
Class j 

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COnfRIGHT DEPOSm 



THE PULPIT 
AND AMERICAN LIFE 



BY 

ARTHUR S. HOYT 



The Work of Preach- 
ing 

Vital Elements of 
Preaching 



THE PULPIT 
AND AMERICAN LIFE 



BY 

ARTHUR S. HOYT 

Professor of Homiletics and Sociology 
Auburn Theological Seminary 



iQetai gotb 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1921 

All righU reserved 



V\ 






Copyright, 1921, 
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY 



Set up and electrotyped. Published, January, 1921 



JAN 26 !32l 



§)CI,A605522 



■ 

i 

J. 
I- 



f n /iBemoris of 

THE ONE HUNDRED YEARS 
OF AUBURN SEMINARY AND 
THE MEN IT HAS GIVEN TO 
THE AMERICAN PULPIT 



THE INTRODUCTION 

Shortly before his death, the late Bishop Henry C. 
Potter of New York published a book on Eminent 
Churchmen he had known. Among the number thus 
treated were great English Churchmen like Dean Stan- 
ley of Westminster Abbey, Canon Liddon of St. Paul's, 
the present Bishop of London, Dr. Winnington- 
Ingram ; and among Americans, Bishop Phillips Brooks, 
our greatest preacher and one of the noblest Ameri- 
cans. The literary critic of a New York daily, after 
praising the literary work of the book, added the 
depreciatory comment that it was a pity so much abil- 
ity and labor were spent upon men whose work was 
" entirely aside from the main currents of human in- 
terests." 

Bishop Potter himself is sufficient answer to this 
common and superficial estimate of the preacher. He 
was not only pastor of churches in Troy, Boston, and 
New York, and finally Bishop of the most important 
diocese of his denomination, but by virtue of his char- 
acter, position, and attainment was a force in the higher 
life of the city and nation. He was the first to point 
out the larger work of the Y. M. C. A. He was a 
pioneer in adapting the Church to its changed environ- 
ment. He taught unflinchingly the social implications 
of Christian doctrine. He proclaimed the social duties 
of the new industrial order. He exposed the shame of 
a corrupt public life. He was a citizen Bishop. No 

vii 



viii INTRODUCTION 

man did more for the higher life of the city he loved. 
And he was a force in the national life, in the highest 
sense a Christian patriot. 

In this time of social rebuilding, it is well to turn 
the thought to the forces that are really creative and 
constructive. The popular thought is too apt to be 
superficial. Men talk of stabilizing the world when 
they mean only return to normal production. They 
forget that the world has been shaken by the clash of 
great ideals — and that peace is a spiritual attain- 
ment — only through justice and mercy and humility. 
Christianity has to do with the contests of our age and 
is involved in their outcome. 

We should know what the teachers of our faith 
have said, how far they have been prophetic, and how 
far they have come short of their mission. The critics 
of the pulpit are not necessarily hostile to religion. 
They may misinterpret its spirit and minimize its at- 
tainment. 

In no other country has public speech been so exalted 
and the pulpit had such an opportunity. Why then, 
they ask, has Christian ethics a partial hold upon the 
people? Why have the thought and conscience of the 
age not been Christianized? The spirit of caste too 
largely controls the relationship of men and coopera- 
tion among the nations is held impossible, contrary to % 
the laws of nature. There are earnest men who think 
Christianity indifferent to the sore burdens of toil, and 
impotent or criminally complacent to the evils of war 
and of a false nationalism. 

Then there is a social idealism working far beyond 
the limits of the Church: it emphasizes the value of 
social action and discounts the power or use of the 
sermon. While men in stately pulpits are talking re- 



INTRODUCTION ix 

ligion, many whom the " preacher cannot school " are 
living the message of Jesus among those who toil and 
suffer. 

And a growing number of *' intellectuals/' often 
children of the Prophets and the Covenant, who de- 
mand self-expression as the way of truth and life, 
regard the preacher as the voice of an outworn past. 
The *' intellectual " is not the least interested in the 
work of the pulpit. ** He is not filled with hatred 
for religion, as were the philosophers of the Eighteenth 
Century; he simply ignores it as a force incapable of 
good or evil." 

Yet through the Babel of voices and the confusion 
of moral ideas, the heart of the race shows its craving 
for God, and now as ever listens to the man who can 
speak of the realities of religion. 

The pulpit needs to be heartened as to its place and 
function in modern life. And the age needs to be 
shown that the ideals of personal and social progress, 
the principles of individual character and national 
worth, are vitally connected with the men who have 
taught through the generations — the shining truths of 
the Christian Gospel. It is time to interpret the past 
and take good reckoning for the future. 

The following lectures aim to interpret the work of 
the preachers who have best represented their age and 
been prophetic and directive of spiritual and social 
advance. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 

PAGE 

The Introduction vii 

The Puritan Preacher ......... i 

Jonathan Edwards 19 

Lyman Beecher 40 

William Ellery Channing 70 

Horace Bushnell 86 

Henry Ward Beecher . . ^ 107 

Phillips Brooks, the Man and the Preacher . . 130 

The Old and New Evangelism , . . . . .153 

Some Distinctive Contributions to the American 
Pulpit 171 

The Present American Pulpit 226 

The Pulpit and Social Welfare ...... 243 

The Pulpit and the Nation ....... 264 



THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 



I 

THE PURITAN PREACHER 

There are three pictures in literature of the Colonial 
minister more vivid and enduring than any record of 
history or volumes of sermons. I refer to Thackeray's 
picture of the clergyman of Virginia, Irving's sketch of 
the Dutch Dominie, and Hawthorne's portrait of the 
parson of New England. 

In " The Virginians," Thackeray does not give a fa- 
vorable impression of the men who acted both as 
preacher and teacher in the easy-going and worldly set- 
tlements along the James. ** Harmless Mr. Broadbent," 
and the young Chaplain Ward with his ** great, glib 
voice and voluble commonplaces " are not pleasant types 
to look upon. " Unlike many of the neighboring prov- 
inces, Virginia was a Church of England Colony; the 
clergymen were paid by the State and had glebes al- 
lotted to them; and there being as yet no Church of 
England Bishops in America, the Colonists were ob- 
liged to import their divines from the Mother Country. 
Such as came were not naturally of the very best or 
most eloquent kind of pastors. Noblemen's hangers- 
on, insolvent parsons who had quarreled with justice 
or the bailiff, brought their stained cassocks into the 
colony in the hopes of finding a living there." Such a 



a THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

picture gives us a sympathy with Colonel Esmond in his 
" suspicion of all Cassocks." 

But it is a question whether the suspicion is just. 
The times were worldly and skeptical, and the people 
that settled the Southern Colonies were very different 
in their social and religious ideas from their stern 
brethren of the North. No doubt the clergymen par- 
took somewhat of the easier and looser ways. The 
fact that the law compelled them to preach in the fore- 
noon and catechize in the afternoon, and '* not to give 
themselves to excess in drinking or playing at dice, or 
any unlawful game, but at all times hear or read some- 
what of the Holy Scriptures," proves at least that they 
were too susceptible to the worldliness of their parishes. 
Yet there were good men among them. Whitefield 
found the fields ready for his reaping. " Take them 
all in all," says a recent writer, " we must conclude 
that the English clergymen in America proved them- 
selves useful, worthy, important, acceptable. They did 
not share in public life to the extent that their brethren 
of the profession did in the North. Conditions were 
such that their functions were restricted to the tasks 
which centered in the Church." The gentle Christian 
influence of Robert Hunt, the first minister, has been 
called the salt that saved the Colony from utterly per- 
ishing of its vices. There were Richard Buck, sent 
out by the Puritan Bishop of London, and Alexander 
Whittaker, the Apostle of Virginia. 

New Amsterdam was a commercial enterprise of the 
thrifty Dutch India Company, and not founded like 
Plymouth under the impulse of freedom to worship 
God. But the Hollanders had purchased their liberty 
at a great price and they brought their religion with 
them. But it was nearly twenty years before Jonas 



THE PURITAN PREACHER 3 

Michaelius, the first minister of the Gospel, was wel- 
comed by the 270 souls on Manhattan. " I keep my- 
self/' he wrote, '* as far as practicable within the pale 
of my calling wherein I find myself suflficiently occu- 
pied." But one of his successors. Dominie Bogardus, 
did not fail to interest himself in the welfare of the 
colony, and speak out against the evil practices of the 
governors. Van Twiller and iKieft (satirized by Irv- 
ing). ''What are the great men of the country but 
vessels of wrath and fountains of woe and trouble? 
They think nothing but to plunder the property of 
others, to dismiss, to banish, to transport to Holland." 
The old Dominies — Michaelius, Bogardus, Megapolen- 
sis, Bacherus, Selyns — are certainly an interesting 
company of men. '' Their knowledge, manhood, service, 
rendered them conspicuous in the Colony," and they 
and their successors ministered to their own people 
with personal interest and loyalty. That they were 
somewhat easygoing, exclusive, and arbitrary in their 
claims of authority, and unequal to the aggressive op- 
portunities of the New World, is also evident. At the 
time of the capture of New Amsterdam, there were 
three cities, thirty villages and ten thousand inhabi- 
tants and but six ministers, and at the end of the cen- 
tury the six had dwindled to four — and yet Dominie 
Selyns in his annual report could congratulate himself 
that *' our number is now full " — while hundreds of 
Colonists were coming into the valley of the Hudson, 
and ministers from New England and missionaries 
from the S. P. G. of the Mother Country were follow- 
ing their wandering sons into the wilderness. 

There were men in the Dutch Church of apostolic 
zeal like Frelinghuysen, and other Colonies had their 
true apostles. Anything like even an outline history 






4 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

of the colonial pulpit could not fail to mention such 
names as John Woolman, the Quaker preacher, whose 
journal edited by Whittier is one of the classics of the 
devotional life; Makemie, the founder of Presbyterian- 
ism; the Tennents of Log College fame and fervid 
evangelists ; of the work of Count Zinzendorf and the 
Moravian preachers among the growing colonies of 
Swedes and Germans. 

But we must turn to New England to find a typical 
and influential pulpit of the early time. The people 
were homogeneous. They brought the heritage of com- 
mon ideals ; they were molded by similar environment. 
They were providentially separated for the working 
out of the new and higher type of character. They 
came to found a godly commonwealth. Religion was 
the prevailing tone of their life. The minister was the 
accepted leader. Education was to form a capable and 
godly ministry. As in the Scotch families described 
by Mr. Barrie and Ian Maclaren, the first question 
asked of the child was not ** What is your name? " but 
'" What are you to be? " And one boy out of every 
family would answer, " A minister." So the pulpit of 
New England was the distinct and distinguishing fea- 
ture of their life. No pulpit ever had such a chance. 
No pulpit ever developed such distinct types, or more 
dominant ideals. To know the American pulpit, our 
habits of thought and worship, our ideals and oppor- 
tunities of service, one must look at the Puritan Min- 
ister, 

The popular conception of the Puritan Minister has 
been formed largely by fiction, by such portraits as 
Hawthorne's Arthur Dimmesdale and Mrs. Stowe's 
Dr. Hopkins — the first a pure creation, the second 
true in the main to a noble life. The minister of " The 



THE PURITAN PREACHER 5 

Scarlet Letter " has powerfully impressed our imagi- 
nation. His separation from men, his outer marks of 
sanctity, his unnatural condemnation of life and yet 
tempted as other men, his introspective habit, his fear- 
ful analysis of mental and emotional states, and his 
sensitiveness and susceptibility to the very world of 
sense that his theology condemned, makes him no 
doubt true to nature — the very product of New Eng- 
land — and yet in no large sense representative. The 
inevitable impression of such a portrait — that the Puri- 
tan ministry were no better than other men, and at 
heart not as good as they ought to have been — is false 
to the fact. 

At the opposite extreme is Mrs. Stowe's portrait in 
*' The Minister's Wooing " — a learned man, guileless 
as a child, wrapped up in the abstractions of theology 
and innocent of human nature and most of all of him- 
self — an example of absolute other-worldliness — an- 
alyzing the deepest and tenderest emotions and pas- 
sions with the coldest logic, and sternly following wher- 
ever the logic led. They are the two extremes of the 
Puritan Minister — both true and neither representa- 
tive. 

No man or class of men is separate from his fel- 
lows. He is both product and force. We are condi- 
tioned by the times in which we live — and in a closer 
and narrower sense by the local and personal environ- 
ment of our lives. 

The New England Minister was the product of 
Puritanism. Mr. John R. Green in his *' History 
of the English People " has given us the truest de- 
scription of Puritanism in its greatness and littleness. 
With the open Bible ^ new conception of life and man 
followed the gayety and adventure of the Elizabethan 



6 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

time. The great problems of life and death, the obsti- 
nate questionings of the soul, pressed for answer. 
Life gained in moral grandeur, in a sense of the dig- 
nity of manhood, in orderliness and equable force — 
while it lost in largeness of feeling and sympathy. 
The greatest gain of life, however, was in the new 
conception of social equality. There was a brother- 
hood in Christ. The meanest peasant felt himself en- 
nobled as a child of God. The proudest noble recog- 
nized a spiritual equality in the poorest Saint. But 
the bond to other men was not the sense of a common 
manhood, but the recognition of brotherhood among 
the elect. Without the pale of the saints lay a world 
which was hateful to them, because it was the enemy 
of their God. Little things became great things in the 
glare of religious zeal. Life became hard, rigid, color- 
less, as it became intense. 

Transplant the Puritan into the New World, with the 
struggle for life under new and hard conditions, the 
contests with nature and with savage men; men of 
similar convictions and ideals together, cut off from 
the larger world, forced to develop their life unquali- 
fied by contact with other types and phases of life — 
and you have the Puritan atmosphere of New Eng- 
land. They were the favored of God. They lived 
under the great Taskmaster's eye. Earnestness was 
the prevailing note of life. Life was in reality a war- 
fare. The letters and diaries and sermons of the time 
show the lofty seriousness of old and young. The 
contest of the soul projected its shadows upon the 
world about them. There is almost no love of nature 
in these early letters and poems. The gloomy aisles 
of the forests seemed at times to be the resort of evil 
spirits. The text of Davenport's first sermon at New 



THE PURITAN PREACHER 7 

Haven, the first message of God to the little company 
of pioneers was : *' Then was he led up into the wil- 
derness to be tempted of the devil." 

'' Sterile New England was a sort of half Hebrew 
theocracy, half ultra-democratic republic of little vil- 
lages, separated by a pathless ocean from all the civ- 
ilization and refinement of the Old World, forgotten 
and unnoticed, and yet burning like live coals under 
the obscurity with all the fervid activity of an intense, 
newly-kindled, peculiar and individual life." ^ 

The minister was the best expression and the true 
leader of the New World Puritanism. No minister 
landed with the Pilgrims. Their pastor, John Robin- 
son, was not permitted to see the promised land to 
which his ardent faith and inspiring word directed his 
people. But Elder Brewster exercised all the gifts 
of a pastor. Every infant settlement had its church 
and clergyman. The Puritan Company that had the 
settling of New England took care that there should 
be ** plentiful provision of godly ministers." The first 
article of settlement of the inland town of Springfield 
provides for ** a godly and faithful minister, with all 
convenient speed, with whom we propose to join in 
church covenant, to walk in all the ways of Christ." 
And John Cotton wrote home to the Motherland that 
there was *' nothing cheap in New England but milk 
and ministers." 

The meeting house was the central building of the 
Puritan town. The roads were laid out in reference 
to it, and the village grew up about it. The different 
forms through which the building passed in colonial 
days all preserved the central form of the pulpit. No 

1 " Old Town Folks." 



8 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

order of men was ever more firmly established in the 
life of a people than the Puritan Minister. 

And who were the men that stood in the pulpit — 
the place lifted up in the thought of the people? They 
represented the best life of the Mother Country. 
Three of them, Cotton, Hooker, and Davenport, were 
invited to sit in the Westminster Assembly. Cotton 
at the age of twenty-three had made a reputation as a 
preacher at Cambridge University, and for twenty 
years had been vicar of the noblest parish church in 
England, that of St. Botolph's of Boston. At last he 
yielded his place for larger liberty of prophesying and 
sought the simple congregation of the wilderness. He 
was among the first pastors of the new Boston. From 
1630-1647, during the Puritan immigration, ninety 
university men had come to the American churches; 
in fact, all the early ministers were university grad- 
uates. *' The guiding and directing force of the Puri- 
tan churches was supplied by an element which was 
itself molded on the banks of the Cam and the Isis, 
under the influences and refinements of the best cul- 
ture which the England of that day could give." 

And when the Puritan immigration stopped — as it 
did with the establishment of civil and religious liberty 
in England — under Cromwell, the Puritans of New 
England were able to raise up and train their own 
ministry, not behind in ability — and not much behind 
in training, the men that had come from Oxford and 
Cambridge. Hardly a score of feeble villages had 
been planted along the coast when Harvard was es- 
tablished — its seal, ** For Christ and the Church," in- 
dicating the great purpose of its founders, to train a 
ministry for the Kingdom of God in the New World. 
And as soon as the settlers began to move westward, 



THE PURITAN PREACHER 9 

along the valley of the Connecticut and the single 
Mother College was not right at their doors, Yale be- 
gan with the same sacred mission. The Church and 
the school were together — and the teachers of reli- 
gion must be picked men and given the best culture 
possible. 

The first President Dwight of Yale described what 
he calls '* the progress of every clergyman . . . until 
he arrives at the desk. From infancy to manhood his 
whole character is subjected to the inspection of his 
parents, of his schoolmaster, of the parish in which he 
is born and bred, of the government of the college in 
which he is educated, of the Church to which he is 
united and of the clergyman by whom he is instructed 
in theology." The Bible and questions of religion 
were an essential part of the college training. There 
were no theological schools, but the apprenticeship, as 
it may be truly called, of the young man to the study 
and parish of some eminent minister gave him a quick 
entry into the hearts of men and an early understand- 
ing of his great task — though of course not the 
breadth of culture that belongs to the modern school 
of theology. 

A man coming from a community essentially reli- 
gious, thus picked and trained, could not fail to be a 
leader and leave his mark on all life. He was a leader 
in education. For the first century the minister was 
both the inspirer and director of schools and colleges. 
All the professors and tutors were ministers or men 
on the way to the calling. Moses Hallock educated in 
his own family over 300 young people. Dr. Wood 
trained two of his parishioners for college, Ezekiel 
and Daniel Webster. ** Patrick Henry was always 
ready to acknowledge his debt for instruction and in- 



lo THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

spiration to Samuel Davies, whose style of eloquence 
in the pulpit was the model that he adopted in his 
own great speeches." ^ 

The Puritan Minister created the early literature. 
One of the first books published was the " Bay State 
Psalm Book." And sermons and theological discus- 
sions were about the only literature in the hands of the 
people. The romance and drama of the Elizabethan 
age were thought unholy to eyes once opened to the 
heavenly beauty and the '* Paradise Lost " had not 
been written. The first systematic theology was that 
of President Willard of Harvard — series of sermons 
that were preached in the college chapel and at the 
South Church in Boston. The minister was not a 
religipus recluse, but a man of affairs. He was often 
a farmer as well as a preacher, and interested in every- 
thing that pertained to the welfare of his fellow men. 

His social position was assured. And in civil mat- 
ters his voice was influential. There was no separa- 
tion between sacred and secular. The State was a 
theocracy. Town meetings were called in connection 
with the mid-week lecture and opened by him with 
prayer, and he spoke out on practical matters with 
other men. In fact it was a saying that New Eng- 
land was run by the parsons and their families. The 
word parson itself sums up his position, for it is only 
another word for person — the person of the town. 
And we must believe that he won this not by the asser- 
, tion of authority so much as by his manhood, by the 
rational, fearless, practical, large-hearted way that he 
dealt with men and affairs. President Dwight de- 
clared that '' The real weight of clergymen in New 

1 " Clergy in American Life," p* 5. 



THE PURITAN PREACHER II 

England consisted wholly in their influence; an influ- 
ence derived from their office and their conduct." 
They embodied the highest ideals and set forth the vital 
principles of their common activity. 

Cotton Mather's '* Magnalia " is the best picture of 
the life: *' The prose epic of New England Puritan- 
ism, it has been called, setting forth in heroic mood the 
principles, the history, and the personal characters of 
the fathers. The principles, theologic and disciplinary 
alike, are stated with clearness, dignity and fervor. 
And the life-like portraits of the Lord's chosen, though 
full of quaintly fantastic phrases and artless pedan- 
tries, are often drawn with touches of enthusiastic 
beauty." And Professor Wendell in his '* Literary 
History of America " says that the New England 
Puritans " embodied first that kind of restless versa- 
tility which characterized Elizabethan England, and 
which even to our own day has remained characteristic 
of New England Yankees." 

And now as to the sermons. They were of goodly 
length and the people did not usually consider them an 
infliction. The hour glass was the monitor of length, 
and when the last sands were running out the preacher 
was drawing his application to a close. Some sermons 
were proverbial for length. Mather Byles used to 
preach his one hour; then taking the hour glass in 
hand and turning it over, he would say, '* Now we will 
take a second glass," and the people made no serious 
objection to the witticism or the sermon. The texts 
were commonly doctrinal statements or accounts of 
miraculous events. The sermons were essentially doc- 
trinal — as much so as the lecture of a theological class- 
room. Life was simple and centered upon the great 
themes of religion. The people were able and ready 



12 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

to follow the course of abstruse discussion. There 
were few or no books in their homes. No newspaper 
press connected them with a larger world and dis- 
tracted their attention to manifold interests. The ly- 
ceum had not arisen, with its platform of free discus- 
sion. Social life was narrow and isolated, and so the 
minister, trained to high thought, and making the Bible 
and its great questions of being the supreme study, 
poured the strength of his mental and spiritual life 
into the pulpit. He fed the people with strong meat. 

The mid-week lecture was an expository sermon, 
taking some book by course. John Cotton went 
through the books of the entire Bible in this way. A 
systematic teaching of the young was a part of every 
minister's work. '* Milk for Babes " by John Cotton 
was used for more than a century and printed as a part 
of the New England primer. 

Of course the doctrinal order was broken by some 
topic of present interest, as when Mr. Williams 
preached against veils and Mr. Eliot denounced wigs, 
long hair and tobacco. The doctrine always had its 
practical bearing; but the sermons, compared with 
those of the present day, were abstract and speculative, 
and lacking in the variety and reality of interest that 
make the strongest appeal to men. 

Neither was there the warm and rich personality 
that we now expect in the best preaching. The mold 
of the thought was about as fixed and mechanical as 
the theology. The Puritan divines were strong souls 
that left their idea of a sermon as a form imposed 
upon their successors for generations. ** The method 
of sermonizing was first to unfold the text historically 
and critically ; then raise from it a doctrine ; then bring 
forward the proofs, either inferential or direct; then 



THE PURITAN PREACHER 1 3 

illustrate it or justify it to the understanding by the 
reasons drawn from the philosophy of the subject, or 
the nature of things ; and finally conclude with an im- 
provement by the way of uses or inferences and timely 
admonitions and exhortations. These applications, or 
uses and exhortations often formed the greater part of 
the discourse." 

John Robinson never came to New England, but his 
spirit came with the little band of exiles, and he can be 
called the first preacher of the New World. A short 
passage from his farewell sermon to the Pilgrims gives 
his style and spirit: 

Brethren, we are now quickly to part from one an- 
other, and whether I may ever live to see your faces on 
earth any more, the God of Heaven only knows; but 
whether the Lord has appointed that or no, I charge you 
before God, and His blessed angels, that you follow me 
no farther than you have seen me follow the Lord Jesus 
Christ. If God reveals anything to you by any other 
instrument of His, be as ready to receive it, as ever you 
were to receive any truth by my ministry ; for I am verily 
persuaded, I am very confident, the Lord has more truth 
yet to break forth out of His holy word. For my part, 
I cannot sufficiently bewail the condition of the Reformed 
churches, who are come to a period in religion, and will 
go at present no farther than the instruments of their 
reformation. The Lutherans cannot be drawn to go be- 
yond what Luther saw; whatever part of His good will 
our God has revealed to Calvin, they will rather die than 
embrace it; and the Calvinists you see, stick fast where 
they were left by that great man of God, who yet saw 
not all things. 

The freedom from human authority, the reverence for 
the Scripture, the faith in larger things is character- 



14 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

istic of the Pilgrim spirit that made the progressive 
element of New England life. 

I take another extract, this time from Mr. Hooker, 
who moved in 1636 with his congregation from Cam- 
bridge through the wilderness and settled Hartford, 
and whom Mr. John Fiske, in his *' Beginnings of New 
England," calls the father of American Democracy. 
The sermon is on the '* Activity of Faith " and has the 
formal structure and minute divisions of the time, but 
a directness and liveliness quite his own, that makes it 
still good reading. The part that I choose is the ^' use'/ 
so called, the practical truth derived from the doctrine. 
He has established the doctrine that. " Faith causeth 
fruitfulness in the hearts and lives of those in whom 
it is," and then he applies the use in the following 
homely and pungent way : 

If this be so, then it falleth foul, and is a heavy bill 
of indictment against many that live in the bosom of the 
Church. Go thy ways home, and read but this text, and 
consider seriously but this one thing in it: That whoso- 
ever is the Son of Abraham hath faith, and whosoever 
hath faith is a walker, is a marker; by the footsteps of 
faith you may see where faith hath been. Will not this 
then I say, fall marvelous heavy upon many souls that 
live in the bosom of the Church, who are confident and 
put it out of all question, that they are true believers, 
and make no doubt but what they have faith? But look 
to it, wheresoever faith is, it is fruitful. If thou art 
fruitless, say what thou wilt, thou hast no faith at all. 

Alas ! these idle drones, these idle Christians, the 
Church is too full of them! M^en are continually hear- 
ing, and yet remain fruitless and unprofitable; whereas 
if there were more faith in the world, we should have 
more work done in the world; faith would set feet, and 
hands, and eyes, and all on work. Men go under the 



THE PURITAN PREACHER 15 

name of professors, but alas ! they are but pictures ; they 
stir not a whit; mark where you found them at the be- 
ginning of the year, as profane, as worldly, as loose in 
their conversations, as formal in duty as ever. And is 
this faith ? O ! faith would work other matters, and pro- 
voke a soul to other passages than these. 

There is a vividness and directness and practical power 
in this way of putting truth that belonged to the early 
Puritans, and you notice that the style in its nervous 
vigor is the style of Shakespear and the English Bible. 

The doctrines of the older Calvinism were the 
preaching practically for a hundred years, but with this 
difference. The early preachers, Robinson, Cotton, 
Eliot, Hooker, and men like them, put the emphasis 
upon personal responsibility — using the motives ad- 
dressed to free beings. 

But as church life in New England became estab- 
lished and religion developed from within — the isola- 
tion of their life ensuring the logical development of 
doctrine — the central truths of the early Calvinism 
asserted their supremacy — the stress was placed more 
and more on God's part in redemption, and man was 
left practically passive and religion and preaching be- 
came formal and hard and dogmatic. 

Take tip the sermons of Cotton Mather — fifty years 
after Hooker the most voluminous writer in the early 
literature — and you feel at once the change in tone 
and style. He has poetic elements — power of vision 
and feeling, but they are marred by strange conceits 
and even puerilities. The interpretation is artificial, 
everything bent to establish formal doctrine, and the 
exhortations with which the sermon is plentifully sprin- 
kled, seemed mechanical, without light and warmth. 
There is not the reality of rich thought and life. There 



l6 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

is lacking that pervasive spirit of humanness — knowl- 
edge of men and sympathy with them — that charac- 
terizes the best preaching of every age. 

An age of stronger preachers came with Edwards 
and his successors. The work of the spirit was em- 
phasized and the discrimination between the Church 
and the world drawn with sharper lines. The preach- 
ing of the " Great Awakening " once more dwelt upon 
man's choice and led to revivals and great mission- 
ary movements. And yet the preaching was meta- 
physical rather than Scriptural. They elaborated doc- 
trine with matchless mental acuteness. " Sermons 
were arguments, chains forged with the set purpose 
to hold in subjection the minds of men." 

No one has drawn a more vivid picture of the later 
Puritan preacher than Mrs. Stowe in '* The Minister's 
Wooing " : 

Living an intense, earnest, practical life, mostly tilling 
the earth with their own hands, they yet carried on the 
most startling and original religious investigations with 
a simplicity that might have been deemed audacious, were 
it not so reverential. All old issues relating to govern- 
ment, religion, ritual, and forms of church organization 
having for them passed away, they went straight to the 
heart of things, and boldly confronted the problem of uni- 
versal being. They had come out from the world as 
witnesses to the most solemn and sacred of human rights. 
They had accustomed themselves boldly to challenge and 
dispute all sham pretentions and idolatries of past ages 
— to question the right of Kings in the State, and of 
Prelates in the Church; and now they turned the same 
bold inquiries towards the Eternal Throne, and threw 
down their gloves in the lists as authorized defenders of 
every mystery in the Eternal Government. The task they 
proposed to themselves was that of reconciling the most 



THE PURITAN PREACHER 17 

tremendous facts of sin and evil, present and eternal, 
with those conceptions of Infinite power and benevolence 
which their own strong and generous natures enabled 
them so vividly to realize. 

Dr. Samuel Hopkins of Newport, the hero of the 
" Minister's Wooing," is best known by the doctrine 
attached to his name. " It has been his too exclusively 
known opinion that * we should be willing to be 
damned for the glory of God.' The fact that he was 
actually and very practically willing to be, and was, 
damned by many Newport gentlemen and traders, for 
his interference with their business of slave-catching 
and owning, has had scantier recognition." His opin- 
ions that virtue is disinterested benevolence, and that 
moral perfection is the goal of human life had great 
influence on the later views of Edwards and are felt 
a generation later in Channing's conception of Chris- 
tianity as '' the perfect life." 

They were often the poets of metaphysical theology, 
and built systems in artistic fervor. They presented 
a lofty ideal — and as often left men disheartened and 
despairing in their inability. There wasn't much en- 
couragement for struggling virtue. There was little 
food convenient for the lambs and the weaklings. It 
has been well said that they knocked out every round 
of the ladder but the highest — and then said to the 
world, ** Go up and be saved." 

And the effect of this preaching is not hard to trace. 
It was preaching for an elect few, for the hard think- 
ers delighting in metaphysical subtleties, or the deeply 
devout natures who longed after an unworldly ideal — 
but not food for the multitude who must be won 
through human affections and the sacraments of love. 

The first generation were picked men. They were 



l8 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

all religious, and they had things their own way. All 
the circumstances of life were helps to religion. Their 
children were not in daily contact with a Godless world. 
And yet the children did not become church members. 
In the second generation but one in four of the men 
were professing Christians. The sermons and dis- 
cussions of the time — the end of the seventeenth 
century — are full of pathetic complaint of *' The great 
unf ruitfulness under the means of grace." There was 
a steady declension of spiritual life under high Calvin- 
ism until the revival movements under Edwards and 
his successors modified the doctrines and preached the 
Gospel with saving power. The Puritan preacher en- 
nobled and exalted the few who were able to receive 
his truth, but to the many his truth was a hard say- 
ing — and many thoughtful sensitive natures were left 
without peace and happiness. But they were loyal to 
truth — as they saw it. They revered conscience as 
their King. God's will was supreme. And they have 
left as a permanent deposit in our laws and institutions 
and literature and ideals, a regard for duty as the voice 
of God. 



II 

JONATHAN EDWARDS 

Mr. George Bancroft, our historian, has written: 
** He that would know the workings of the New Eng- 
land mind in the middle of the eighteenth century 
and the throbbings of its heart, must give his days and 
nights to the study of Jonathan Edwards." And Pro- 
fessor Allen of Cambridge, the last biographer of Ed- 
wards, adds the comment : *' He that would under- 
stand the significance of later New England thought, 
must make Edwards the first object of his study." 

And to these common American estimates, I would 
add the words of Dr. Fairbaim of Oxford, in the 
" Prophets of the Christian Faith " : '* We are fain 
to confess that in this lone New Englander, preaching 
now in Northampton, whether amid the excitement of 
the Great Revival or in the face of the coldness of an 
estranged people, and now laboring in the backwoods 
at Stockbridge, amid Indians and amid countrymen 
ruder than the Indians, we yet have one who holds 
his place amid the most honorable of the doctors of the 
Church, of the philosophers of his century, and of. the 
Saints of God." '* He is perhaps the only American 
intellect," says Dr. George A. Gordon, " that deserves 
a place in the ranks of the world's great thinkers. We 
can be sure that he is among the Kings ; we cannot be 
sure that another name in our history is there." 

It is not the purpose to speak of Edwards as a 
thinker; though without question, it is as a thinker 

19 



20 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

by his books on philosophy and theology, that he has 
influenced men far more than by person and speech. 
Yet it is the easier and narrower task that I set my- 
self, to speak of Edwards as a preacher. 

Three questions we must ask, if we would under- 
stand the work of any preacher ; they concern the mes- 
sage, the manner, the personality. What truth did the 
man speak? Was the word simply an echo of other 
voices — or was it a personal and peculiar message — 
a prophet's word in adaptation to the need of the gen- 
eration and in its directness and reality from the spirit 
of God? How was it spoken? In the conventional 
form and accent of the time, or in new channels of 
power? And more subtly still — what was the per- 
son behind message and speech, the peculiar and rich 
elements of personality that transmuted truth into 
life? 

I would try to get some idea of the man first. He 
was a product of the intense, isolated, religious life of 
New England. " In the attempt to understand him," 
says Dr. Fairbairn, *' we have first to realize the com- 
parative isolation in which he lived, and therefore the 
independence with which he worked. If we put him 
back into his time without recollection of his place, 
no man could seem less the son of his century. He 
was born in 1703, a year before Locke died. In Eng- 
land, Deism had commenced its belligerent and barren 
career. Berkeley had entered Trinity College, and was 
jotting down in his commonplace book the specula- 
tions that were later to become a new * Theory of Vi- 
sion ' and furnish the * Principles of Human Knowl- 
edge.' Toland was busy proving Christianity not mys- 
terious, and arguing for a new Theism which should 
make God all in all. Of those who may be regarded 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 21 

as more strictly his contemporaries, Joseph Butler en- 
tered Oriel College, Oxford, just about the time Ed- 
wards entered Yale. David Hume, eight years his 
senior, became, like Edwards, a student of Locke, but, 
unlike him, so interpreted Locke as to deduce from 
him a system of universal doubt, which did not, like 
that of Descartes, spare thought and find through the 
ego a way into reasoned belief. In France, in the very 
year of Edwards' birth, Voltaire entered, a boy of 
nine, the great Jesuit school, the College Louis le 
Grand, and began to prepare himself to conduct his 
crusade — in its essence more Christian than those of 
the middle ages — against the tyranny of the unreal 
and make-believe in religion. While Edwards was 
pastor in Northampton, Rousseau was indulging him- 
self in all the luxury of sentiment, and feeling his 
way toward the limitation of the individual and the 
construction of society through the ' Social Contract.' 
As Edwards, diffident in secular things while greatly 
daring in intellectual, was describing to the Corpora- 
tion of Princeton his * peculiarly unhappy constitu- 
tion ... his contemptibleness of speech, presence, and 
demeanor, much unfitting me for conversation, but 
more especially for the government of a college,' and 
hesitating to accept the position offered to him — a 
younger contemporary in Germany, Lessing, w^as turn- 
ing his thoughts to the reform of the theater, and to 
a more scientific interpretation of religion and its his- 
tory. But Edwards in his New England home lived 
apart from all these European movements and influ- 
ences. They could, indeed, hardly be said to have 
touched him." 

He inherited the earnest, analytic, introspective, 
speculative mind of New England. Its most thought- 



22 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

ful life came to flower in his mind. When a mere boy 
in years the reading of Locke's essay on the under- 
standing revealed the bent of his mind and started the 
train of philosophic study — carried on to the day 
of his death, and shaping all his work as preacher 
and controversialist. It is not certain that he ever 
studied the works of Bishop Berkeley, but one of his 
college tutors, Samuel Johnson, was an ardent dis- 
ciple of Berkeley, and Edwards was vitally affected 
by Idealism. A recent writer thinks his idealism an 
independent vision of truth. The keen, patient, pene- 
trative, analytic mind would have made notable addi- 
tions to science or law had it been devoted to such pur- 
suits. The outer world, as in most young and ardent 
souls, did make its appeal to the boy. And his study 
of American spiders, when but twelve years, sent to 
the Royal Society of Great Britain, is the first record 
of nature-study in the Colonies, and the promise of 
what he might have done had he given himself to pure 
science. But to neither science nor philosophy was 
this life born. His call was not to philosophy but to 
religious teaching. ** To the life of the Spirit he was 
anointed from his birth." His studies on the mind 
and the nature of excellence, written when at college, 
at sixteen, are perhaps without parallel for his years — 
and were essentially reproduced at fifty in the discus- 
sions on the '' Nature of True Virtue." But questions 
of mind were subordinate to those of the soul. Prob- 
lems of Being were God, and man's relation to God. 
Speculation was started and governed for the ends of 
salvation. God was the good — and the all — Reli- 
gion was the end of thought — the substance of life. 
Edwards was a dedicated spirit. Religious impres- 
sions were strong from the earliest years. 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 23 

But the years immediately following his graduation 
at Yale were those of special religious interest and 
growing consecration. He studied two years with a 
minister, as was the custom, then had a short service 
in a Presbyterian church in New York, and was called 
back to Yale to serve for three years as a tutor. The 
latter years were full of unfolding conceptions of truth 
and deepening of feelings. 

The resolutions written before he was nineteen show 
the strength and sincerity of his religious nature: 

Resolved, never to do any manner of thing, whether in 
soul or body, less or more, but what tends to the glory of 
God, nor be nor suffer it, if I can possibly avoid it. 

Resolved, to live with all my might, while I do live. 

Resolved, never to do anything which I should be 
afraid to do if it were the last hour of my life. 

Resolved, never to count that a prayer nor to let that 
pass as a prayer, nor that as a petition of a prayer, which 
is so made that I cannot hope that God will answer it. 

The boy here was father to the man. The spirit of 
loftly resolve characterized his entire life. When he 
took charge of the church at Northampton at twenty- 
five, he did so as a student who would not let his Hf e be 
frittered away in useless employments. The preacher 
was the messenger, and the strength of life must be 
devoted to getting and giving the message. He sought 
first of all a better knowledge of the Bible. He made 
few visits, feeling that they were too often but the 
gratification of social nature. He gave thirteen hours 
a day to hard study. His life was one of simplicity, 
discipHne, toil — devotion to the highest things. 

There was little or no recreation. He had a gracious 
and gifted wife. One of the most quaint and beauti- 



24 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

f ul letters — it might be called a love-letter — was the 
one written to the young girl who afterward shared 
his desires and his toils. The wife in both mental and 
spiritual gifts was a fit companion for the husband. 
Children were born to them. There must have been 
play and laughter, and the sweet joys and sports of 
childhood. But little of this breaks in upon the pre- 
vailing seriousness of life. He knows nothing of 
recreation, accountable no doubt for his own descrip- 
tion of his later constitution — '* attended with vapid 
and scarce fluids and a low tide of spirits." Towards 
the end of his life he happened upon a novel that in 
some mysterious way had found entrance into his 
house, the " Clarissa " of Richardson, and he got such 
delight out of it, such rest for his mind overtaxed in 
a single and fixed direction of thought, such food for 
the human sympathies, starved a little by concentra- 
tion upon the absolute and etherial goodness, that he 
confesses that he had made a mistake in not knowing 
more of the joys of imagination in poetry and fiction, 
and the rest and renewal of nature. 

Lyman Beecher, a true successor of Edwards in na- 
ture and doctrine and work, kept the balance of life 
and preserved his youthful sympathy and spirit by 
his fondness for rod and gun, and by the frolics and 
discussions with his eager crew of boys. Edwards 
was essentially an ascetic — not the sour and repellent 
kind — but the truer and nobler type — by the domi- 
nance of his moral earnestness. His denial was not 
for merit, with little morbid self-consciousness, but for 
work; the discipline of his own life and that of his 
household for the higher purpose that he felt to be 
for the glory of God. 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 25 

But the most beautiful and dominant trait of Ed- 
wards' character was his passion for the divine. He 
might be called, as Maurice was, " a God-possessed 
man." He was an IdeaHst and a Mystic. God was 
all. The external world was the expression of God 
in finite modes. The human soul was God working 
in the sphere of mind. '' He was penetrated with the 
mystic's conviction of some far-reaching, deep-seated 
alienation which separates man from God " — and also 
of the immediate communication to men of spiritual 
light and life. One of his first published sermons 
(1734) was from the words of Christ to Peter: 
** Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona; for flesh and blood 
hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is 
in heaven." And his doctrine — *' A divine and super- 
natural light immediately imparted to the soul, shown 
to be both a Scriptural and Rational doctrine." The 
modern verse voices his spirit exactly : 

Beyond the sacred page 
I seek Thee, Lord: — 
My spirit pants for Thee, 
O Living Word. 

We read in his Diary in the early years of his min- 
istry : ** Once as I rode out into the woods for my 
health, in 1737, having alighted from my horse in a 
retired place, as my manner commonly has been to 
walk for Divine contemplation and prayer, I had a 
view that for me was extraordinary, of the glory of 
the Son of God, as mediator between God and man, 
and his wonderful, great, full, pure, and sweet grace 
and love, and meek and gentle condescension. This 
grace that appeared so calm and sweet, appeared also 



26 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

great above the heavens. The Person of Christ ap- 
peared ineffably excellent with an excellency great 
enough to swallow up all thought and conception — 
which continued, as near as I can judge, about an 
hour; which kept one the greater part of the time in 
a flood of tears, and weeping aloud. I felt an ardency 
of soul to be, what I knew not otherwise how to ex- 
press, emptied and annihilated; to lie in the dust, and 
to be full of Christ alone; to love him with a holy 
and pure love; to trust in him; to live upon him; to 
serve and follow him; and to be perfectly sanctified 
and made pure, with a divine and heavenly purity. I 
have had several other times very much of the same 
nature, and which have had the same effects." 

A nature intense and spiritual, a mind speculative 
and rational, a faith pure and elevated — and you have 
the rare and noble personality. It is this that must 
ever be held in thought as the all pervasive and effective 
force in considering his influence as a preacher. 

The person of Edwards expressed the lofty soul 
within. Tall and slender — of grave and gracious 
manner, his face with something of the feminine cast 
— but without weakness ; a face speaking of a deli- 
cate and nervous organization, implying at once ca- 
pacity for both sweetness and severity, he had the 
presence and the spirit that we associate with St. 
John. 

Put a man so dowered by nature, and so under spir- 
itual forces, into a Puritan community like Northamp- 
ton at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and 
the religious movement termed the " Great Awaken- 
ing '' seems the natural result. It does not lessen the 
fact that the Spirit of God touched men, to keep be- 
fore us the natural conditions for His working. 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 27 

What was the message of Edwards' sermons ? The 
truths of the older Calvinism — shaped by his ideal- 
ism and made vivid by the intensity and reality of his 
spiritual conceptions. 

He has been called a monotheistic idealist, with the 
emphasis upon the mono. " In a sense there is noth- 
ing but mind and its ideas — those of man being ef- 
fects from those of God." Nature is thus the con- 
tinuous creation of God. 

His philosophy governed his theology and shaped 
his preaching. *' God is and there is none else." 
" Creation is the disposition of God to communicate 
himself, to diffuse His own fullness." " Religion is 
imitation of God." " Virtue is love to the greatest 
happiness, or governed by the very end for which God 
made the world. True virtue is love for God." 

His sense of the dreadfulness of sin increased with 
his vision of the fullness and perfection of God. The 
fall had wrought catastrophe in human life. It had 
made a gulf between God and Man. 

In his representations of the nature of God, he 
seems to take the opposite pole from modern thought, 
viz., the Divine distinct and different from anything 
human. *' The human and the divine have nothing in 
common." He makes nothing of the objection that 
all the attributes of God's holiness, as justice, love — 
are seen to belong to the nature of man, at least in 
germ. Here is the distinct advance of modern theol- 
ogy. '' All religious philosophy will admit that in 
God there is the Eternal Prototype of humanity. All 
religious thinking must recognize in the Deity an 
Eternal basis for the nature, the advent, the career and 
ideal of humanity. What possible interest can hu- 
man beings have in the Infinite, if society is not organ- 



28 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

ized out of His life, if He is not the ground of its 
order and hope ? " ^ 

This of course affected Edwards' view of man's 
nature, his doctrine of sin and regeneration. As there 
was nothing in human nature since the Fall that had 
anything in common with the divine nature, human 
nature was totally sinful. He drew a sharp distinc- 
tion between the natural and the spiritual. All the 
moralities of common life — its duties, its loves, its 
delights — were only natural, they were without God, 
cut off from the operations of his spirit. At times 
he teaches that the common operations of the Spirit 
may affect men in the family and in society — but there 
is no divine life in them. And so he portrayed as never 
before or since the evil of the human heart, pursuing 
with his persistent logic the sin into every motive and 
action of life. His view of total depravity is the pic- 
ture of life as he conceived it, totally without God's 
influence. He says of children : ** As innocent as 
young children seem to be to us, yet if they are out of 
Christ, they are not so in God's light, but are young 
vipers, and infinitely more hateful than vipers, and are 
in a most miserable condition as well as grown per- 
sons." 

Such a doctrine is wrought out in the study — let- 
ting his logic work with the exactness of mathematical 
processes — but is not the conclusion from his study of 
the scriptures and human life. Let a life be without 
a particle of divine influence — with absolute separa- 
tion, alienation from God — and the result would be 
the picture of Edwards. But such a picture is an ab- 
straction of his own brain. Such is not life. No life 

1 Gordon, Geo. A,, ** The Christ of To-day," p. 115. 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 29 

IS absolutely without the influences of the Spirit. 
God's spirit is as real and present and universal as 
man's sin. And all men are the children of God, 
however much they have wandered from the Father's 
house and life. '* Nothing could be subHmer than Ed- 
wards' conception of God at his best; nothing could 
be more incredible than the treatment to which he sub- 
jects the race under God. His theology is living, pow- 
erful ; it is bound to become in the new century a pro- 
founder influence ; his anthropology has become a my- 
thology." ^ 

Edwards made prominent in the teaching of the pul- 
pit the Doctrine of Regeneration. " That there is an 
absolute and universal dependence of the redeemed on 
God for all their good " he taught in the first printed 
sermons (1731). In regeneration something was im- 
parted absolutely different from the sinful or natural 
life. And this new life was to be imparted by the will 
of God. He rejected the natural, instinctive working 
of the conscience against the absolute sovereignty of 
God, as an evil to be overcome, and he brought himself 
to receive sovereignty as the chief fact. His theory 
of the will — hailed by Hume and others of the em- 
pirical school as a doctrine of necessity and so essen- 
tially anti-Christian — turned the thought to sov- 
ereignty and regeneration rather than repentance and 
faith. One is free only to follow disposition. The dis- 
position towards holiness is the direct impartation of 
the Spirit. " An inclination is nothing but God's influ- 
encing the soul according to a certain law of nature." 
And so Edwards preached the holiness of God, the 
divine excellence of Christ, the nature of true affec- 

1 Edwards, " Retrospect," p. 65. 



30 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

tion, the awful state of the sinner, and the majority 
of his hearers who were led to faith passed through 
long and agonizing periods of self-examination — al- 
ternations of hope and fear — before they felt the as- 
surance and joy of the new life. Even tragic expe- 
riences attended his preaching — souls waiting for the 
heavenly change, and left hopeless in growing dark- 
ness of the mind. 

In contrast to this moral inability, this helpless de- 
pendence upon the sovereignty of God, contrast the 
modern appeal to will. I take a paragraph from Dr. 
Taylor's Paul the Missionary — Paul before Agrippa : 
'' The will is the rudder of the soul, and turneth it 
whithersoever it listeth ; and when that will chooses to 
give in and give up to Christ, the man becomes a 
Christian. Thus, in a very solemn sense, God has 
placed our everlasting destiny in our own choice. If 
we receive life from Christ, it is because we will 
to come to him; and if we die eternally, it is be- 
cause we will to die. No man becomes a Christian 
against his will ; it is by willing to be so that he becomes 
a Christian, and it is over this willing that the whole 
battle of conversion has to be fought. There is no one 
here who may not be saved, if he will." 

In the first year of his ministry Edwards wrote his 
sermons and read them. In later years he often 
preached without writing. He was quiet in his man- 
ner, making few gestures, his voice never loud, marked 
by little physical earnestness, but with a penetration 
and spiritual intensity that carried his truth to the 
innermost being and lighted up the most hidden re- 
cesses of motive and affection. This quiet, philo- 
sophic preacher had greater mastery over his audiences 
than Whitefield. The body itself sympathized with the 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 31 

writhings of the spirit. And at times hell seemed 
yawning under their feet, and men rose and laid hold 
of the pillars of the church for fear their feet should 
slide into the place of torment. 

" It was his manner also which helped to make him 
what he is confessed to have been, the greatest preacher 
of his age. His gift was individual, original; he was 
neither made nor spoiled by the schools. He was in- 
imitable, his power was never described. He was no 
glowing orator. He spoke quietly and with little ges- 
ture, but as one who knew. His eyes were seeing 
things of which he talked, and not the people to whom 
he spoke. He was calm and pale, he had the form of 
an ascetic; rapt and serious in look, it was his habit 
to lean upon the pulpit with marvelous eyes alight, a 
face illuminate from within, earnest, confident, au- 
thoritative, with nothing in his vesture or manner 
priestly except that his heart was touched with the 
feeling of our infirmities." ^ 

The style on the whole is plain, marked by few beau- 
ties, making its appeal directly to reason and con- 
science, through the arguments from scripture and ex- 
perience. Here is an example of the plain, practical 
preaching that follows the keen analysis of the scrip- 
ture and the doctrine derived from it. It is from a 
sermon on Joseph's Temptation and Deliverance. One 
of the inferences is '* We may in many things deter- 
mine whether any custom be of a good tendency by 
considering what the eflfect would be if it was openly 
and universally owned and practiced." And then he 
applies the principle to frolics (probably country 
balls) : 

1 Edwards, p. 103. 



32 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

I desire our young people to suffer their ears to be 
opened to what I have to say on this point, as I am the 
messenger of the Lord of hosts to them, and not deter- 
mine that they will not harken, before they have heard 
what I shall say. Try this custom by these rules, and 
see whether it will bear the test or not. Two things will 
be found: 

1. Where there is most of this carried on among young 
people, it will be found that the young people are com- 
monly a loose, vain and irreligious generation; little re- 
garding God, heaven or hell or anything but vanity. 
And that community in those town where most frolick- 
ing is carried on, there are the most frequent breaking 
out of gross sins; fornication in particular. 

2. They are the persons furthest from serious thought, 
and are the vainest and loosest on other accounts. And 
whence should this be, if such a practice was not sinful, 
or had not a natural tendency to lead persons into sin? 

And so he goes on. He has used his powers of intel- 
lect to build up a massive doctrine and then he uses 
inference after inference to pursue the soul, to hunt 
out and condemn the particular practice that he feels 
is hostile to the eternal welfare of the soul. It is a 
fair example of the practical spirit of his sermons. 

One is impressed perhaps most of all in reading the 
sermons with Edwards' sense of the dreadfulness of 
sin and his portrayal of the terrible reality of it. 
Whatever be the text or doctrine, you will find some 
vivid picture of sin. Here is one from the sermon on 
the ** Free Christian Life." He has been describing 
the heavenward journey, and then he places another 
picture beside it by way of sharp contrast : 

Some men spend their whole lives, from their infancy 
to their dying days, in going down the broad way to de- 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 33 

struction. While others press forward in the straight 
and narrow way to life, and laboriously travel up the 
hill towards Zion against the inclinations and tendency 
of the flesh; these run with a swift career down towards 
the valley of eternal death; towards the lake of fire; to- 
wards the bottomless pit. 

A wicked man is a servant of sin ; his powers and fac- 
ulties are all employed in the service of sin, and in fitting 
for hell. 

Thus do all unclean persons, that live in lascivious 
practices in secret. Thus do all malicious persons. Thus 
do all profane persons, that neglect duties of religion. 
Thus do all unjust persons; and those that are fraudu- 
lent and oppressive in their dealings. Thus do all back- 
biters and revilers. Thus do all covetous persons, that 
set their hearts chiefly on the riches of the world. Thus 
do far the greater part of men; the bulk of mankind are 
hasting onward in the broad way of destruction. 

In many of the sermons — nearly all that I have 
read — the appeal is made boldly and terribly to the 
sense of fear. There is little appeal to the higher ele- 
ments — too little showing of the '* winsom and per- 
fect form of goodness." In a single volume are 
** God's Enemies," " The Damnation of Sinners," 
" The Punishment of the Wicked," ** Eternity of Hell 
Torments," and " Sinners in the Hands of an Angry 
God": 

We can conceive but little of the matter (he says) — 
one cannot conceive what that sinking of the soul in 
such a case is. But to help your conception, imagine 
yourself to be cast into a fiery oven, all of a glowing 
heat, or into the midst of a glowing brick-kiln, or of a 
great furnace, where your pain would be as much greater 
than that occasioned by accidentally touching a coal of 
fire, as the heat is greater. Imagine also that your body 



34 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

were to lie there for a quarter of an hour, full of fire, 
as full within and without as a bright coal of fire, all 
the while full of quick sense; what horror would you 
feel at the entrance of such a furnace! And how long 
would that quarter of an hour seem to you! If it were 
to be measured by a glass, how long would the glass seem 
to be running! And after you had endured it for 
one minute, think how overbearing would it be to you 
to think that you had it to endure the other four- 
teen ! 

And he goes on increasing the minutes to hours, and 
the hours to years, and to millions of years, and with 
each addition the horror grows. But why go on? 
One example is enough. Such realism of hell has 
never been portrayed outside of Dante and Dore. In 
fact, Edwards is the very Dore of the pulpit in his 
minute, realistic, materialistic portrayal of suffering. 
Human nature cannot endure it. It must cry out. A 
minister who heard the sermon on '* Sinners in the 
Hands of an Angry God" plucked Edwards by the 
tails of his coat, crying out in his agony, ** Oh ! Mr. 
Edwards, is not God a God of mercy? " 

But we shall get a partial and wrong view of these 
sermons if we think of them chiefly for their notes of 
warning. There are transcendental views of love in 
them, and the sense of beauty and the poetic elements 
of imagination and feeling. There is a mind like 
Wordsworth in some of his observations : 

The Son of Man creates the world for this very end, 
to communicate himself in an image of His own excel- 
lency. He communicates himself properly only to spirits, 
and they only are capable of being proper images of His 
excellency, for they only are properly beings. Yet he 
communicates a sort of shadow or glimpse of His ex- 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 35 

cellencies to bodies which, as we have shown, are but 
the shadows of beings and not real beings. 

So that, when we are dehghted with flowery meadows 
and gentle breezes of wind, we may consider that we 
see only emanations of the sweet benevolence of Jesus 
Christ. When we behold the fragrant rose and lily, we 
see His love and purity. So the green trees and fields, 
and singing birds are the emanations of His infinite joy 
and benignity. The crystal rivers and murmuring 
streams are the footsteps of His favor, grace and beauty. 
That beauteous light with which the world is filled in a 
clear day is a lively shadow of His spotless holiness, and 
happiness and delight in communicating himself. 

When we think that love of nature had not yet found 
voice in Thomson, and Gray, and Burns, and Words- 
worth, we must recognize the trueness and tenderness 
of this Puritan soul amid the shadows of sin and suf- 
fering. This seems a companion to the Crusaders' 
Hymn from the German of the sixteenth century : 

Fairest Lord Jesus, 

Ruler of all nature, 

O Thou of God and Man the Son; 

Thee will I cherish. 

Thee will I honor. 

Thou, my soul's glory, joy, and crown. 

Fair are the meadows. 

Fairer still the woodlands, 

Robed in the blooming garb of Spring; 

Jesus is fairer, 

Jesus is purer. 

Who makes the woeful heart to sing. 

Fair is the sunshine. 
Fairer still the moonlight, 



36 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

And all the twinkling, starry host; 

Jesus shines brighter, 

Jesus shines purer. 

Than all the angels heaven can boast. 

Twenty-five years at Northampton, ten years at 
Stockbridge, preaching to Indians and frontiersmen, 
and sending books and sermons to the press, and a 
few months as President of Princeton College, makes 
the outline of his life. There is no sadder chapter 
in the annals of the American pulpit than his expe- 
rience at Northampton. After years of devoted serv- 
ice — and religious awakenings from his preaching 
that stirred the entire community and the colonies — 
the people turning against him, and in bitterness driv- 
ing him from his pulpit. But according to the old 
story, the children have built the sepulcher of the 
prophet — the name of Edwards resting on the chief 
church of Northampton, and the name the special 
honor of the town. 

The preaching of Edwards banished the sacramental 
tendency from the Puritan Church, though he lost his 
own church by it. The line had gradually been less- 
ened between church members and the congregation. 
Baptism was administered to all and all urged to come 
to the Lord's Table, often considering it as a saving 
ordinance. But Edwards' sharp distinction between 
the common and special influences of the spirit, be- 
tween the natural and spiritual life, and his bringing 
into prominence the doctrine of regeneration led anew 
to the spiritual conception of the Christian life. 

Edwards' doctrine of the freedom of the will (a free- 
dom only in name) became a bridge to modern Cal- 
vinism in which freedom implies choice of motives. 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 37 

He preached so that men were profoundly moved. 
He defended the preaching which appeals to the affec- 
tions. ** What the people need is not to have their 
heads stored, so much as to have their hearts touched." 
And there is a close connection between this appeal to 
emotions — the revival fervor that swept the colonies 
— and the beginnings of the sentiments of humanity, 
breaking the coldness, and cruelty of the seventeenth 
century, and finding expression in efforts to reach the 
heathen and to free the slave. The philanthropies and 
social struggles that have made our century bright with 
promise got something of their inspiration from the 
work of Edwards. *' Edwards stood like Dante at 
the beginning of a new age and at the dividing of the 
waters, after the long regime of Puritanism in the 
English-speaking world. He too was the precursor 
of a great humanitarian movement which went on 
accumulating in power till it became the controlling 
force in the nineteenth century, manifesting itself in 
literature, in art, in science, and political economy, till 
it culminated in the sociological movements of the age 
in which we live." ^ 

No doubt his printed word has had far more influ- 
ence than the spoken sermons. In his bold search 
for truth, in his trust to the processes of an enlight- 
ened reason, in his effort to find the reasonableness of 
truth, he marks an era in Christian thought. He is 
father of those who have sought for deeper realities. 
In some of his later works, and the unpublished MSS. 
'* he anticipated many of the best conceptions in later 
discussions — the affinity of the two natures as a pre- 
supposition of personal union, the genuineness and 

1 Edwards, p, 9. 



38 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

value of our Lord's humanity, and his eternal media- 
tion." 

In spite of the scholasticism of much of his teach- 
ing, and the severity of some of his accents, he is a 
man with his face to the future, a prophet of the later 
day. ** His spiritual philosophy, his sense of God, the 
light and radiance of his pure and lofty character, the 
penetrativeness of his insight into the unity of the 
cosmos . . . will attract and enlighten and quicken. 
We shall not go back to him, nor yet go forward with- 
out him." 

In this far too brief and superficial study of the ser- 
mons of Jonathan Edwards, two truths or lessons have 
taken shape with growing clearness. It would be well 
if we could get something of his realization of God's 
presence, his '' practice of the presence of God," to 
use the phrase of Father Lawrence. God spoke to 
him, and all that he saw and did had direct and vital 
relation with God. Call it mysticism if you will, all 
the great souls from Paul to Phillips Brooks have had 
this God-consciousness. It has given elevation to their 
life and authority to their word. 

Then I think it would be well if we had a prof ounder 
sense of sin. It is often hard for us to think of men 
as lost. The refinements of our life and thought, the 
spiritualizing of our conceptions of reward, of heaven 
and hell, have no doubt dimmed the sharpness of pen- 
alty, and taken from many eyes the horror of sin. We 
cannot frighten men into the noblest life. The tran- 
scendent view of love which Edwards taught, in con- 
trast to the narrow selfishness of e^rly New England, 
leads us to this lesson. But men ought to fear sin, 
and an outraged goodness. Goodness is not an easy 
indifference ; it is moral order, and sin — the least you 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 39 

can think of — is moral disorder. We must not for- 
get the wrath of the lamb. One of the truths recov- 
ered, like the writing of an old palimpsest, by the sharp 
chemicals of war, is the dreadfulness of sin and the 
helplessness of men left to natural law. 

While I would try to realize the fact of God and the 
guilt of sin, I am grateful that men have followed out 
the suggestions of Edwards' thinking, and that God 
is in His world, everywhere for its good; that He is in 
Christ redeeming the world to Himself ; that the whole 
race is lighted with the dawn of a new day; that no 
soul is lost save by the willful rejection of light. 

For the love of God is broader 
Than the measures of man's mind, 
And the heart of the eternal 
Is most wonderfully kind: 
But we make His love too narrow 
By false limits of our own, 
And we magnify His strictness 
With a zeal He will not own. 



Ill 

LYMAN BEECHER 

The story of Lyman Beecher has a three-fold value. 
We see in him the first half of the nineteenth century. 
Probably more than any other minister, and quite as 
much as any public man like Webster, he made a large 
part of the life of his time, (i) His own varied ex- 
perience mirrors the social life in our first national 
period. (2) His lectures and articles, and to a cer- 
tain extent, his sermons, express the earnest and some- 
times fierce religious and theological controversies that 
marked the American churches. (3) And no other 
preacher so fully illustrates, I think, the place and in- 
fluence of the pulpit in the development of the higher 
life of America. Of these three things I shall first 
speak, and then attempt a portrait of the man and the 
preacher. 

I 

The Social Life of His Time 

When Lyman Beecher was settled in his first church 
at East Hampton — the eastern end of Long Island — 
the life of the people was very simple and primitive. 
There was more respect for position than now, but no 
barrier between groups of people. The standing order, 
as it was called, still held in his native State, Con- 
necticut. The Congregational Church was the State 

40 



LYMAN BEECHER 41 

Church, its ministry supported by public taxes. The 
minister was socially the first person of the town, and 
in all occasions and functions where a particular order 
was designated the minister was placed first. And yet 
the Church and Society were thoroughly democratic 
in the sense that each one had equality of opportunity. 
The way was free for every one to make the most of 
native gifts. Lyman Beecher was the son of a New 
Haven blacksmith and he had his boyhood and youth 
on an uncle's farm near Windsor. And he had as 
good training and his social opportunity was not less 
than the most favored of the land. Whatever the 
calling, for every one there was much hand toil. The 
minister was often a farmer and kept his body sound 
by hard outdoor work and touched men in the fellow- 
ship of work. Lyman Beecher got his exercise and 
living too out of the soil, at East Hampton and later 
at Litchfield. At Cincinnati as pastor and President 
of Lane Seminary he cut his garden out of the forests 
of Walnut Hills, and became as skilled in using his 
ax against the tall trees as Gladstone later became. 
At Boston he used to saw his own wood, and his saw 
hung on the walls of his study, which he was as care- 
ful to sharpen as the points of his sermons. When 
he had finished his own pile, he would take his saw to 
a neighbor's wood pile and win men as he worked. 

The picture of his first parish. East Hampton, is a 
good example of the simple life in his time. It was 
the last year of the eighteenth century. '* The town 
consisted of the plainest farm houses, standing directly 
on the street, with the wood pile by the front door, 
and the barn close by, also standing on the street. 
There was so little traveling that the road consisted 
of two ruts worn through the green turf for the 



42 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

wheels, and two narrow paths for the horses. The 
wide green street was usually covered with flocks of 
white geese. On Sundays all the families from the 
villages about came riding to meeting in great two- 
horse uncovered wagons. It is probable that more 
than half the people of those retired villages made no 
other journey during their whole lives." 

That was before the days of either the steamship 
or the railway. His few household goods were car- 
ried across from New Haven in a sloop. When he 
presented the call of his church to Presbytery he had 
to go on horseback eighty miles to Newtown, now a 
church in greater New York. Says Mr. Beecher in 
his reminiscences, " There was not a store in town, 
and all our purchases were made in New York by a 
small schooner that ran once a week. We had no 
carpets: there was not a carpet from end to end of 
the town. All had sanded floors, some of them worn 
through; your mother introduced the first carpet. 
Uncle Lot gave me some money and I had an itch to 
spend it. Went to a vendue and bought a bale of 
cotton. She spun it and had it woven; then she laid 
it down, sized it, and painted it in oils, with a border 
all around it, and bunches of roses and other flowers 
over the center. . . . The folks of the village thought 
it fine. Old Deacon Tallmadge came to see me. He 
stopped at the parlor door and seemed afraid to come 
in. ' Walk in, deacon, walk in,' said I. * Why I 
can't,' said he, ' 'thout steppin' on't.' Then after sur- 
veying it awhile in admiration — * D'ye think, Brother 
Beecher, ye can have all that, and heaven too ? ' " 

The example of a minister on a community is strik- 
ingly seen in the following extract. It is from a letter 
of May, 1802. ** I am able to cut wood. Have 



LYMAN BEECHER 43 

planted my apple seeds, set out more trees, and begun 
to plant my garden." And then follows the comment, 
** Mine was the first orchard in East Hampton. Peo- 
ple had had the impression that fruit would not do 
well so near the salt water, and laughed when they 
saw me setting out trees. ... It was not long, how- 
ever, before others, seeing how well my orchard was 
thriving, began to set out trees. Now apples are 
plenty there. In our front door-yard your Mother 
had flowers and shrubs, and some of them are there 
yet. There is a snow ball and catalpa which she set 
out; others saw this and did the same. The wood 
piles were cleared away from the street in front of 
the houses, and door-yards made pretty, and shade 
trees set out; and now you will not find many places 
prettier in summer than East Hampton." 

Lyman Beecher's second church was at Litchfield, 
Connecticut, one of the most beautiful towns of New 
England. It was the seat of a famous Law School, 
afterward removed to New Haven and made part of 
Yale University. Here was also a girls' school that 
drew young women from all parts of the Eastern 
States, a forerunner of the colleges and the higher edu- 
cation of women. Litchfield was noted for its able 
and distinguished men, and for its cultivated women. 
A French Count who came to visit the law school de- 
clared that '* Litchfield had the most charming society 
in the world." The Governor of the State lived here 
and a United States Senator. Yet there were few 
marks of separation — few social distinctions that pre- 
vented community of feeling and interest. There were 
no great fortunes that tended to standards of living 
impossible for the majority of men. The pastor of 
the Litchfield Church, the first man in town intel- 



44 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

lectually and in religious and social leadership, had a 
salary of $800. 

The following pictures from Catherine Beecher, the 
oldest daughter, afterwards the famous teacher at 
Hartford, will help one to understand the combined 
simplicity and intellectual life of the time. *' No less 
distinguished in point of literary cultivation was the 
family of George Gould, for many years associated 
with Judge Reeve in the law school, and afterward its 
principal. He was of fine appearance, polished man- 
ners, extensive acquaintance with the English Classics, 
and in all matters of rhetorical or verbal criticism his 
word was law. The Judge was fond of disputing with 
father, in a good natured way, the various points of 
orthodoxy handled in his discussions, particularly the 
doctrine of total depravity, and in a letter written dur- 
ing the last war, when party feeling ran high — the 
Democrats for, the Federalists against French influ- 
ence — he sent a humorous message : * Tell Mr. 
Beecher I am improving in orthodoxy. I have got so 
far as this, that I believe in the total depravity of the 
whole French nation.' " She says of Miss Pierce's 
school for girls, *' The school house was a small build- 
ing of only one room, probably not exceeding 30x70 
feet, with small closets at each end, one large enough 
to hold a piano, and the other used for bonnets and 
overgarments. The plamest pine desks, long plank 
benches, a small table, and an elevated teacher's chair, 
constituted the whole furniture. At that time the 
higher branches had not entered girls' schools. Map- 
drawing, painting, embroidery and the piano were the 
accomplishments sought, and history was the only study 
added to geography, grammar, and arithmetic. Miss 
Pierce had a great admiration for the English Classics, 



LYMAN BEECHER 45 

and inspired her pupils with the same. She some- 
times required the girls to commit to memory choice 
selections of English poetry. And her daily counsels 
were interspersed with quotations from English clas- 
sics.'' Mr. Beecher helped the school by frequent ad- 
vice and address, and by such voluntary service his 
own daughter had her tuition. Here Harriet Beecher 
Stowe, the first woman novelist of our land, gained 
her first schooling. The girls found homes in the 
village, and through his entire pastorate at Litchfield, 
girls from the school were members of his family. 
It was a life so homogeneous that the influence of an 
attractive and devoted preacher and pastor touched the 
entire community. 

Here is the picture of a wood bee : ** When the 
auspicious day arrived, the snow was thick, smooth and 
well packed for the occasion; the sun shone through 
a sharp, dry, and frosty air ; and the whole town was 
astir. Toward the middle of the afternoon, runners 
arrived with news of the gathering squadrons — Mt. 
Tom was coming with all its farmers; Bradleyville 
also; Chestnut Hill, and the North and South Settle- 
ments ; while the town hill gentry were on the qui vive 
to hunt up every sled and yoke of oxen not employed 
by their owners. Before sundown, the yard, street, 
and the lower rooms of our house were swarming with 
cheerful faces. Father was ready with his cordial 
greetings, adroit in detecting and admiring the special 
merits of every load as it arrived. The kind farmers 
wanted to see all the children, and we were busy as 
bees in waiting on them. The boys heated the flip 
irons and passed round the cider and flip while Aunt 
Esther and the daughters were as busy in serving the 
doughnuts, cake, and cheese; and such a mountainous 



46 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

wood pile as rose in our yard never before was seen 
in ministerial domains ! " 

Mr. Beecher's life in Boston was not so different 
from the village pastor. Boston couldn't have reached 
50,000 people. There was the self-respect of long in- 
heritance and something of a world-outlook through 
her merchants, an intellectual ferment among her in- 
telligent people. But there was still much of the sim- 
plicity of the colonial isolation. No steamships brought 
the Old World near — only the slow and lumbering 
stage connected with distant towns and other states. 
Mr. Beecher went with his own horse and chaise from 
Litchfield to Portland to marry his second wife. And 
the household in moving to Boston made a slow cara- 
van, just as the emigrants from Connecticut and 
Massachusetts came into the forests of central New 
York at the same time. 

Even as late as 1832, when Dr. Beecher, then recog- 
nized as the first preacher of New England, started 
for Cincinnati to be the first President of Lane Sem- 
inary and the Professor of Theology, the way was 
long and painful. To New York by water, then by 
coach and horses to Philadelphia, thence over the Alle- 
ghany Mountains into Pittsburgh, and finally down 
the Ohio, by boat or by stage all the way. It took 
more weeks to make the journey then than it does 
days to-day. Chicago was no more than a frontier 
fort and a trading village attached. Cincinnati was a 
thriving river town, by its easy water connection the 
center of the western world. But it was largely a 
pioneer world, unknown and undeveloped, rough and 
eager, ambitious and hopeful. Into this life of exuber- 
ant youth Dr. Beecher came, a man of fifty-eight, to 
lay the foundation of a new enterprise and meet the 



LYMAN BEECHER 47 

hardships and struggles of a new land. But he was 
undaunted; it stirred his blood, his whole manhood 
responded to it. He was another Ulysses, 

". . . Strong in will 
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." 

The people of the West were not so different from 
the East, only with a new freedom, born of the ex- 
panse of rivers and prairies. They were practically all 
of eastern stock, children of the first foreign invasion, 
some of them from his former parishes. This rough, 
free, simple life suited his own independent, unconven- 
tional, democratic nature. He entered into it without 
reserve and tried to guide it into ways of righteous- 
ness. He could do anything that became a man, and 
he had everything to do. He had the care of all the 
churches. He answered notable occasions of churches 
and colleges, he labored in special services to begin 
churches or revive the faith of the weak. He could 
swim his horse through a swollen stream, and travel 
the forest paths in as rapt contemplation of Christian 
truth as Edwards enjoyed in the groves of Northamp- 
ton. He saw hope where others read disaster. He 
carried enterprises through by the force of his per- 
sonality; it was the force of a great faith. He rode 
his horse over rough and wet roads, seventy miles in 
twenty hours, that he might be at Fort Wayne, In- 
diana, for the installation of one of his sons. That 
test was hard enough to meet the demands of a Roose- 
velt. He had an equivalent mental hardihood which, as 
we shall show, served him well through those years in 
which he struggled to hold New England in the Eyan- 
cal jcamp. 



48 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 



The Religious and Theological Contests 

The first years of the nineteenth century was a 
period of great intellectual and spiritual ferment. The 
isolation of the colonial period had been broken. The 
Revolution had brought America into touch with Eu- 
rope. The spirit of democracy, the worth and free- 
dom of the individual, reacted against the authority 
of a dogmatic Puritanism. The literature and phi- 
losophy of the Old World spoke of the freedom of the 
Spirit, the promise of larger life. 

It was no wonder — it was inevitable — that these 
voices were heard in the new nation, conscious of its 
strength, dazzled with visions of its future. Every 
bond of liberty must be thrown off; every obstacle to 
progress be broken down. In the struggles of the 
New World the necessary restraints of virtue, the laws 
of reverence and obedience, were often broken with the 
shackles of despotic thought and government. 

When Lyman Beecher entered Yale, the first Presi- 
dent Dwight was giving the sermons and lectures that 
did so much to bring the spirit of reverence and devo- 
tion into the life of the college. At first the number 
of professing Christians among the students of Yale 
could be numbered by the fingers of one hand, and 
Bishop Meade of Virginia said that he expected to 
meet a disciple of Tom Paine in every educated man 
he met. 

Lyman Beecher was of that intellectual and moral 
nature to receive the old truths of religion that had 
been preached by Edwards and re-interpreted by 
Dwight and to take them into the new world of ideals, 
.struggles, and hope, and make them th^ yital elements 



LYMAN BEECHER 49 

of personal character and social and national progress. 

He had his own philosophy of religion, he worked 
out the natural realism of Reid and Hamilton, the 
Scotch School, without even reading their lectures. 
But his doctrine was shaped by its purpose to reach 
and save men. His evangelical spirit modified and 
shaped his doctrine. He helped to break the bondage 
of dogmatism and make Christianity the practical in- 
strument of salvation. 

Lyman Beecher was in the thick of every contest 
where he felt the truth was at stake. He was a sort 
of knight-errant preacher. But he never opposed men 
save as he felt they opposed the truth and so stood in 
the way of the salvation of others. He was singu- 
larly committed to the truth as he conceived it an in- 
strument of life and remarkably free from all mere 
personal spirit in his work. 

Infidelity was widespread when he began his min- 
istry. He felt called to his first church '' to break the 
heads of these infidels." His intense nature was fond 
of using strong figures of speech, but no man had a 
tenderer heart or treated men with more personal con- 
sideration. He was a sort of Roosevelt of the pulpit. 
An infidel club had been formed in East Hampton, 
not very large in point of members, but composed of 
men of talent, education, and indefatigable zeal. In 
1785 the Clinton Academy had been founded, the first 
to be chartered by the Regents of the State. It hap- 
pened that two of the teachers employed were skep- 
tical and they had sown the seeds of unbelief in a 
whole generation of young people. So when Mr. 
Beecher went to the place, he felt it was infidelity or 
revivals. To use his own words, '* I did not attack 
infidelity directly. Not at all. That would have been 



50 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

cracking a whip behind a runaway team — made them 
run the faster. I always preached right to the con- 
science. Every sermon with my eye on the gun to hit 
somebody. Went through the doctrines ; showed what 
they didn't mean ; what they did ; then the argument ; 
knocked away objection, and drove home on the con- 
science. They couldn't get up their prejudices, be- 
cause I had got them away. At first there was wink- 
ing and blinking from below to gallery, forty or fifty 
exchanging glances, smiling and watching. But when 
that was over, infidelity was ended, for it was infi- 
delity, for the most part, that had its roots in mis- 
understanding." 

At Litchfield, Lyman Beecher engaged in the con- 
test for the " standing order of Connecticut." The 
Congregational Church was the established form of 
worship, and no other church had legal standing in the 
community. With the growth of population and the 
coming in of other views of life and religion, the old 
church was not comprehensive enough to meet the 
need of the community. The members of the Epis- 
copal Church demanded a richer form of worship, the 
Methodists a more emotional type, and both reacted 
against the dogmas of Puritanism. In the communi- 
ties there was a growing number that found the sup- 
port of religion irksome, and the indifference to the 
Church was fanned into hot opposition by the effort 
to invoke the law for the support of the Church and 
for the enforcement of the strict laws of the Puritan 
Sabbath. So religion inevitably became a matter of 
politics. The Federal or Conservative party was de- 
voted to the existing order, the Democratic party stood 
for freedom in religion and the entire separation of 
Church and State. 



LYMAN BEECHER 5 1 

Lyman Beecher worked in vain to maintain the po- 
sition and power of the Congregational Church. He 
tried to influence pubHc opinion and rally his brethren 
for the defense of the faith, identifying, as good men 
have so often done, their own views and interests with 
the cause of religion itself. It was a lost cause. The 
Democratic party was triumphant, the standing order 
was abolished, and the support of religion made a 
matter of individual choice and all churches placed on 
equal footing before the law. The heart of Beecher 
sank before this flood of seeming indifference and op- 
position to the Church. But he lived to regard the 
storm as big with blessing, the new freedom of the 
Church as quickening its responsibility and giving it 
a better access to the hearts of men. 

His Boston pastorate was in the flush of his power, 
the high noon of his manhood, and he had come to his 
place at the fullness of time. The age needed him. 

The orthodox churches of Boston were in a sad 
minority. Social and political influences were all on 
the side of the Unitarians. The theological landslide 
had swept the generation. Beecher began bravely and 
patiently to construct over against this destruction of 
faith. He felt the revolt had gone so far through the 
misconception of the essential truths of the Gospel, 
due in part to the wrong way in which they had been 
held and taught. He entered into no needless contro- 
versy. He tried to remove misconceptions, to state the 
Gospel positively as he understood it, to commend it 
to the reason and experience of men — to urge it as a 
matter of life and death. He especially tried to 
awaken the sense of moral need, and to present the 
Gospel as a redemption from sin, within the reach of 
every man's choice. 



52 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

" From the time of his settlement in Boston to the 
time of his removal to the West, there was one con- 
tinuous, unbroken revival, less powerful at some times, 
but never wholly intermitted." 

Such successful preaching of the Evangel was bound 
to meet opposition, even to arouse bitter enmity. The 
excitement was so great that when Hanover Street 
Church was burned, the firemen refused to act, stand- 
ing by and singing in derision : 

"While Beecher's church holds out to burn, 
The vilest sinner may return/' 

I think it may be truthfully said that Lyman Beecher 
was the chief human force that turned the tide in New 
England, and finally won the day for an evangelical 
faith. He carried the same spirit into the theological 
controversies of his own church. He manfully con- 
tended for direct appeal to the sense of moral respon- 
sibility, and for freedom in the interpretation of creeds. 
He could not please the hyper-orthodox who would 
have every man ally himself with a distinct party in the 
Church. The controversy between Andover and New 
Haven, between a fixed and a growing faith, was car- 
ried into the Presbyterian Church, and met Dr. Beecher 
as he took up his work at Lane. He was regarded 
with suspicion as the teacher of a dangerous liberalism. 
He was tried for heresy before the three courts of the 
Church, the Presbytery, the Synod, and the General 
Assembly, more than one man's share of such turmoil, 
and acquitted in each, the last acquittance by the last 
Assembly of the old church, before the rending into 
the Old School and the New. 



LYMAN BEECHER 53 



The Place of the Pulpit in American Life 

The career of Lyman Beecher shows the place of 
the pulpit in American life. It was the chief force in 
the development of individual and national life. Ly- 
man Beecher was the true leader in the community — 
he made for social unity. He rallied the people about 
the institutions of religion, brought them together 
through their common purpose and their faith in him 
as their teacher and leader, and by the practical aim 
and nature of his teaching permeated the community 
with the sense of human worth and brotherly obliga- 
tion. 

He made for moral order and growth. He had a 
prophetic spirit, he read the signs of the times, he had 
an ideal distinctly in advance of his age and he called 
men to a higher life. He held God's plumb-line against 
the structures that man had made. He was the first 
to speak out against duelling when the nation was 
shocked by the tragic death of Hamilton, and he helped 
to put an end to this vestige of barbarism. He was 
first in the Temperance Reform. He had been filled 
with shame and indignation at the growing drinking 
habits of the clergy. At two installations the drink- 
ing had been so heavy that church committees com- 
plained of the expense. The ministers were not 
drunk, but there was an undue amount of exhilaration. 
A committee had been appointed to make inquiries and 
report measures to remedy the evil. They reported 
that nothing could be done. *' Not so," thought Ly- 
man Beecher. '* The blood started through my heart 
wbCT I heard this/' he said; and then began action 



54 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

which resulted in the forming of temperance societies, 
making addresses and allying the Church on the side 
of moral reform. 

He was equally opposed to slavery; while he could 
not follow the lead of the radical abolitionist, his voice 
was ever on the side of emancipation throughout that 
long national debate. 

He made for the development of education. His 
preaching and personal influence quickened in young 
men and women the ambition for the best training and 
use. It is seen in the Hfe of his big family of boys 
and girls. They made notable contributions to the 
higher life of the land. 

He had a vision of the great West and felt the im- 
portance of Christian education to its development and 
moral welfare. He helped to form the education so- 
ciety that cherished the planting and growth of Chris- 
tian schools in the newer states and trained men and 
women for Christian leadership. 

He gave his own life to the work and inspired his 
sons to a like service. He had a prophetic vision of 
the Kingdom of God. He had the missionary passion 
to carry the Gospel through every open door. He 
heard the call of the world and his conception of the 
Gospel made him feel his responsibilty to the utmost 
limit. He was one of the founders of the American 
Bible Society. He helped to organize the American 
B'oard of Foreign Missions, and formed the first aux- 
iliary, in the Missionary Society of Litchfield County, 
Connecticut. 

The prophetic vision once more came true. The wa- 
ters that healed everything they touched — that made 
the desert into a garden -r-. flowed from the altar of the 
3anctuary. 



LYMAN BEECHER 55 

4 

The Man and the Preacher 

It is not easy to make Lyman Beecher live again — 
the century since he was in the fullness of his powers 
has made so many and deep impressions upon Ameri- 
can life that he cannot speak to us as to the men of his 
age. But he was about the most live man in the Amer- 
ican pulpit for the first half of the nineteenth century. 

Of course his sermons are not literature; they have 
little of that subtle union of imagination and feeling 
that gives an unfading charm to whatever is written, 
almost without regard to the nature of the subject. 
For the power of his preaching we have to rely almost 
solely upon the testimony of those who knew him best. 
Certainly in his case the words of Phillips Brooks are 
true that the best sermons can never be printed, that 
a sermon that is good to hear is not good to read. 
And Lyman Beecher's sermons, while always care- 
fully thought out, depended upon his audiences for 
their expression and passion. They always had an 
immediate purpose that gave them their form and 
power. As truly as in the case of Henry Clay the 
effect was the outgoing of a magnetic personality, and 
can, in no sense, be understood from the printed page. 

The three volumes of Beecher's works are made up 
of occasional addresses, sermons at special gatherings 
of the general church and that dealt with the theolog- 
ical discussions of the day or of current phases of po- 
litical and social life. They have the mark of the 
time upon them. While every question is discussed 
in the light of a spiritual Gospel, it had its individual 
emphasis which we could not think interpreted truth 
for us. 



56 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

Take the address, '* A Plea for the West/' spoken in 
many places of the East and afterwards enlarged and 
printed as a small volume. It was prophetic in seeing 
the value of the Mississippi Valley in the growth of 
the nation and in calling for men and money to lay 
broad foundations for education and religion as an 
act of highest patriotism. It was a trumpet call. A 
score of colleges might be traced to its influence. It 
is a striking example of the relation of the pulpit 
to the higher life of the nation. But more than half 
of the argument is devoted to the Catholic Church, 
warning his countrymen against the plots and schemes 
of the Catholic hierarchy and Catholic monarchs of 
the Old World to overthrow our republican govern- 
ment and free religion by systematic emigration of 
Catholic peoples and the sending of Catholic mission- 
aries. That such suspicion was natural and almost 
universal among Protestants in the uncertainty of our 
republican experiments and the struggle of churches 
to win a place in the New World must be admitted. 
Lyman Beecher made a strong appeal and closed it 
with a tolerance ahead of his age. But in this respect 
he was too much the slave of his age, and not its true 
interpreter. No man could speak in that way to-day 
and be regarded as a true leader. Such a man would 
be rightly thought as lacking in magnanimity. 

But Lyman Beecher was thoroughly alive. He was 
alive to his finger tips. He had to be at the center of 
things. He was always found where the work was 
the hardest, the contest between truth and error the 
fiercest. He was foremost, not by exalting self over 
his fellows, not by a dominant self-assertion that pushed 
its way to leadership. He was first by the full use of 
his native gifts and his spiritual attainment. 



LYMAN BEECHER 57 

He had a remarkable physical vitality. He was not 
a large man, but he had a boundless energy. He did 
the work t)f two or three men all his life. He was 
not always a well man, but he could not be kept down, 
he would not give up. And his native vigor triumphed 
again and again over disease or exhaustion. 

This physical basis of the man, that sent its energy 
through all the veins of life, was the gift of his race. 
His father and his grandfather before him were black- 
smiths and considered the strongest men of the com- 
munity. They hammered out their iron on an anvil 
made of the oak under which Davenport preached his 
first sermon at New Haven. And this inherited vi- 
tality was felt in all he did. *' I was made for action," 
he says. " The Lord drove me, but I was ready. I've 
always been going at full speed." 

His letters are stories of campaigns. Such hard- 
ness brought moments of weakness. The intense use 
of intellect and nervous force affected his stomach, 
and he always knew there was an enemy within. But 
he was on guard and kept his vigor by manly exercise. 
In his country parishes he worked his fields and took 
long tramps with gun or rod. He always had the 
spirit of play, his blood coursed with the youthful 
spirit, and his crew of restless boys made him a com- 
panion of their sports. But he trained himself that 
the body might be the best witness and servant of the 
soul. When he was a Boston pastor '* He kept a load 
of sand in his cellar, to which he would run at odd 
intervals and shovel vigorously, . . . and his wood pile 
and wood saw were inestimable means to the same end. 
He had also in the back yard parallel bars, a single 
bar, ladder, and other simple gymnastic apparatus, 
where he would sometimes astonish his ministerial 



58 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

visitors by climbing ropes hand over hand, whirling 
over on the single bar, lifting weights and performing 
other athletic feats, in which he took for the time as 
much apparent delight and pride as in any of his in- 
tellectual exertions. His care of what he called regi- 
men — diet, sleep, exercise — went on with all his 
other cares without seeming to interrupt them. He 
seemed to navigate his body, as an acute mariner would 
work his ship through a difficult channel, with his eye 
intent on every spar and rope, each sail kept trimmed 
with the nicest adjustment." ^ 

He never lost sight of the physical side of life. He 
knew that spiritual states were connected with phys- 
ical conditions. And when any one was in deep men- 
tal distress, he always made inquiries about their health. 
He had a clinical theology, when the idea had not been 
discovered by the pulpit. In this matter he was a 
generation ahead of his time. He disliked morbid 
introspection and felt that such books as Brainerd's 
'' Life " and Edwards' '' On the Affections " were a 
bad generation of books for young people. 

He always felt that his own health was connected 
with his work. And in the midst of a special revival 
effort he writes to his wife: *' With good appetite, 
unexhausted spirits, and as fine sleep and firm health 
as I ever had — so you see the promise is fulfilled, 
* As thy day, so shall thy strength be.' Perhaps the 
secret of my faltering health for some time past may 
be want of employment, or rather want of concentra- 
tion in one channel, with a single object and that the 
noblest and most delightful in which men or angels 
can engage — th§ restoration of disordered minds." 

1 Autobiography, 2 : 113. 



LYMAN BEECHER 59 

Even when he was an old man, beyond active work, 
and the Hght of intellect seemed passing into eclipse, 
his body was vigorous. '* The day he was eighty-one," 
says Professor Stowe, his son-in-law, *^ he was with 
me in Andover, and wished to attend my lecture in the 
Seminary. He was not quite ready when the bell rang, 
and I walked on in the usual path without him. Pres- 
ently he came skipping along across-lots, laid his hand 
on top of the five-barred fence, which he cleared at a 
bound, and was in the lecture-room before me." 

Lyman Beecher had a remarkable intellectual and 
spiritual vitality. He was open to impressions. His 
mind was a fertile soil where the best thought of his 
age took root and grew into nourishing fruit. His 
life was fed and quickened by his entire environment. 
Books were few but he mastered the tools of his work. 
He knew his Bible, its great revelation and its abun- 
dant material for teaching. He knew the New Eng- 
land theologians from Edwards to Dwight, and had 
deeply pondered upon the philosophy of their doctrine. 

He was a lover of literature — scanty it was in those 
New England homes — but he loved his Milton, the 
grandeur of the thought and the stately music of the 
verse stirred his soul, and was not afraid of Scott 
when most ministers looked askance at this teller of 
sheer lies. He gave life to many an apple-paring bee 
by merry contests with his children to see who could 
tell the most stories from Sir Walter. 

But his life was sustained and enriched by his own 
vital powers. He was a vital part of the world. He 
drew life from all that touched him. His ceaseless 
correspondence, his animated conversation, his earnest 
discussions all expressed the largeness of his life and 
trained his own powers in return. In the best sense 



6o THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

he was a man among men, alive to every human in- 
terest, active in every worthy concern. He was above 
a narrow partisanship, but he could not help taking 
part in the discussions of New England theology. 
And he always stood for freedom of reverent search, 
and for the right of individual teaching. But his lib- 
erty of prophesying was always regardful of the tem- 
per and method of Christian love. His sermon on 
duelling, the lectures on temperance, the addresses to 
workingmen on Political Atheism, the Plea for the 
West, his intense interest in the slave, his sense of na- 
tional shame, yet national worth, reveal the alert mind 
far-reaching in its visions, and the big heart, able to 
feel with men and so interpret aright the movements 
and issues of life. 

How the abounding vitality of the man is felt in 
every glimpse of his home ! '* Occasionally he would 
raise a point of theology on some incident narrated, 
and ask the opinion of one of his boys, and run a sort 
of tilt with him, taking up the wrong side of the ques- 
tion for the sake of seeing how the youngster could 
practice his logic. If the party on the other side did 
not make a fair hit at him, however, he would stop 
and explain to him what he ought to have said." And 
we have these beautiful words from Mrs. Stowe: 
'* It was an exuberant and glorious life while it lasted. 
The atmosphere of his household was replete with 
moral oxygen, full charged with intellectual electricity. 
Nowhere else have we felt anything resembling or 
equaling it. It was a kind of moral heaven, the pur- 
ity, vivacity, inspiration and enthusiasm of which 
those only can appreciate who have lost it, and feel 
that in this world there is, there can be no place like 
home." (2:309.) 



LYMAN BEECHER 6l 

The intellectual and moral vigor of Lyman Beecher 
found voice in fullness of speech, exuberance of fancy, 
sprightliness of humor that gave charm to his daily in- 
tercourse and to his public speech genuine distinction. 
The humor was in the situation as much as in the sur- 
prise of thought and phrase. He was careless of his 
person and had the absent-mindedness that comes from 
complete absorption in a subject. He would work 
on his sermons Sunday morning oblivious that the 
last bell was ringing and when finally roused to the 
fact of the hour, had to be waylaid by some watchful 
member of his family, lest he should rush into his 
pulpit in slippers and study gown. In public discus- 
sions he would throw his glasses over his head in the 
excitement of speech, borrow another pair, which 
would finally find the same resting place on his head, 
and so on until the top of his head was crowned with 
borrowed glasses. His enthusiasm was something 
perennial. The fountain of feeling seemed always 
full, flowing out in common conversation in joyful 
refreshment, and sweeping like a full tide in public 
speech. 

There was an indescribable authority and charm of 
person, the gift of genius, that gave him instant recog- 
nition and influence. There was a certain air of mys- 
tery, the sense of unknown depths and heights, of in- 
exhausted riches that made him among ministers alone, 
like Daniel Webster in the Senate. 

The vitality of the man spoke in all that he did, 
and to the very end of his life. *' Among the last 
times he ever spoke in the lecture-room of Plymouth 
Church, he said feebly, ' If God should tell me that 
I might choose ' (and then hesitating, as if it might 
seem like unsubmissiveness to the divine will) * that 



62 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

is, if God said that it was His will that I should choose 
whether to die and go to heaven, or to begin my life 
over again and work once more' (straightening him- 
self up, and his eye kindling, with his fingers Hfted 
up) * I would enlist again in a minute.' " 

And this brings me to the work of preacher. Never 
was a man more unmistakably called by nature and 
opportunity to the pulpit than Lyman Beecher. 

His eager nature, his mental keenness and breadth, 
his strong convictions, his quick sympathies, his lively 
imagination, his vivid speech, his moral courage made 
his life vocal. He must speak what he had seen and 
heard. 

And the age helped to make hirp the preacher that 
he was. The freedom of the new time, the mingling 
of people and ideals, the contention of truth and error 
for the mastery, the exalting of speech as never be- 
fore in making public opinion, in deciding the fate of 
individuals and the nation called forth the utmost 
gift of the man as a teacher of the Gospel. 

No man had a truer conception of the ministry and 
his own opportunity. He gave himself and all he 
had to the work of spiritual teaching. There could 
be no more eloquent witness of this fact than his 
seven sons in the ministry and his daughters teachers 
and writers of even larger influence. 

He has set forth the conception of the preacher, 
unconsciously the witness of his own life : " Whether 
I am qualified to do it or not, I am well convinced 
that the peace and power of the Church demands noth- 
ing so imperiously as a ministry inspired with zeal, 
enlarged by comprehensive views, blessed with a dis- 
criminating intellect, and an acute but animated and 
popular argumentation, untrammeled by reading pel- 



LYMAN BEECHER 63 

ished sermons, and able, with a clear mind and full 
heart, to look saint and sinner in the face with an eye 
that speaks, and a hand that energizes, and a heart 
that overflows, and words that burn; competent and 
disposed, under the guidance of the wisdom that is 
from above, to convince gainsayers, allay fears, soothe 
prejudice, inspire confidence and cooperation in re- 
vivals and public charities, and all good things on the 
part of all, of every name, who substantially hold fast 
the truth, and love our Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity." 
(2:275.) 

Lyman Beecher trained himself for his high call- 
ing. Largely an extemporaneous preacfier, he never 
trusted to natural gifts. He was always preparing 
himself for his work, a constant student of the Bible, 
theology, literature (such as he had) and the chief 
concerns of human interest. His mind was full of 
invention. He was fertile in resources, and ever plan- 
ning for larger things. But every address was pre- 
pared with painstaking thoroughness. It was said 
of him that *' he was given to the lust of finish- 
mg. 

He says that *' a cold heart and pride and sloth are 
the only formidable impediments to extempore speak- 
ing, where there is common sense and common pow- 
ers of elocution cultivated by a liberal education." 
But he would by no means give up the pen '* and that 
application to study which, if it can be, never will be 
without writing." And he writes one of his sons, 
*' You will not forget every week to make your ser- 
mons as good as you can, not depending on extem- 
poraneous readiness without careful and discriminat- 
ing thought. Have one sermon every week that will 
tax your intellect and the intellect of your hearers." 



64 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

In such words we see the way the first preacher of 
New England took to gain his power. 

He always had a practical spirit in his preaching. 
The sermon was to do something, and whatever made 
the sermon an effective instrument was welcomed and 
used, and whatever hindered was thrown away as use- 
less. And he brought all truth to this practical test. 
A truth that could not be preached was not a Gospel 
truth, but of vain man's speculation. And in this 
spirit he broke from the older Calvinism that so mag- 
nified the sovereignty of God as to leave men helpless 
in sin, waiting for some act of omnipotence to change 
their natures. He had felt the listless fatalism or 
needless pain of such philosophy, and spoke to men 
as free and responsible and roused men to action so 
that his preaching was constantly followed by con- 
versions and quickened lives. 

He was the fervent evangelist and this made his 
message the good news that brought salvation. He 
felt that theology could best be understood in the 
actual work of saving men. So it was evangelical 
revival theology that he preached. 

'' Into theology thus considered," writes his life- 
long friend Dr. Leonard Bacon of New Haven, '*he 
went as a war-horse rushes into battle. He was a 
man of the people. The people were his peers. Any 
man who had a soul to save or lose for eternity was 
his equal. He went to the encounter of the popular 
mind without a misgiving or a doubt of the absolute 
goodness of his course, or of his own ability, under 
God, to carry the day. For such encounter he was 
uncommonly well adapted. By his deep, rich, warm, 
emotiveness — by his utter informality and freedom 
from pretense — by his insight, his intuitive judg- 



LYMAN BEECHER 65 

ment of what not to say, as well as what to say — 
by his power to shoot arrowy sentences, short but 
sharp — by his quaint and homely illustrations, and 
finally, by the free wit and humor that enlightened 
and enlivened all he did and said, he was adapted by 
Him that made him, when filled with the Holy Ghost, 
to speak to the dead words of resurrection power, 
and to bring to bear on the desolate captives of the 
destroyer the redeeming powers of the world to 
come." (2:579.) 

Dr. Bacon speaks of his arrowy sentences. Dr. 
Beecher had the power of epigram, of giving his 
truth the stamp of the proverb and so making it the 
current coin of thought. His sayings were quoted 
by men of his own day more than any other speaker 
or writer save Benjamin Franklin. 

He appealed to imagination. He used more illus- 
trations than the speakers of his time and so there 
was a picturesque quality that never failed to interest 
his hearers. His oldest daughter, Catherine, speaks 
of the illuminating and invigorating quality of her 
father's sermons that she found in no other preacher. 
He loved the beauty of truth and tried to make it 
glorious, but beauty was always the servant of truth. 
In his journal, the first year of his ministry, he 
makes this comment on a sermon that he had heard: 
" Want of method and not sufficient substance to hold 
up so much ornament. A person's looks may be 
assisted by dress, but if the ornament hide the person 
in view, animals might be made equally beautiful. 
Maxim: Never begin to flourish till you have said 
something substantial to build upon. All the flour- 
ishes in the world will not affect the mind unless they 
relate to, or grow out of, something important, of 



66 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

which the mind is previously possessed. Plain speech 
is best to interest the hearts and persuade." And that 
maxim he followed all his life, to make everything 
the servant of truth. He used to say that the greatest 
thing in the world was to save souls. And that was 
one of the last things he ever said. That was his 
ruling purpose. It never left him. In his old age, 
when his mind was partly clouded, a friend said to 
him in the presence of others, '* Dr. Beecher, you 
know a great deal — tell us what is the greatest of 
all things." For an instant the cloud was rent, and a 
gleam of light shot forth in the reply, ** It is not the- 
ology ; it is not controversy, but it is to save souls." 

And in this passion to save men, he was signally 
free from pride and self-assertion and self-seeking. 
'' He held his whole being subject to the promotion 
of Christ's Kingdom, and he rejoiced in all the genius, 
learning, eloquence, and influence of all or any of his 
brethren, regarding their gifts as his capital with 
which the good cause might be advanced." (2: 530.) 

It was this large-mindedness that helped him to 
win men indiflferent or opposed to his doctrine. He 
went to Boston in the heat of the Unitarian contro- 
versy. Three-fourths of the churches of eastern 
Massachusetts had become liberal and they had carried 
the men of influence with them. The orthodox was 
regarded with contempt or opposition. Lyman 
Beecher knew that men could not live on negation, 
that the movement was in part a reaction from the 
false emphasis of orthodoxy. He was able to inter- 
pret the heart and bring many to a positive faith. 
*' The feeling which I now have, and have from the 
beginning breathed out in all my sermons, is the same, 
if I can judge,' which Jesus himself experienced, who 



LYMAN BEECHER 67 

was moved with compassion when he saw the multi- 
tude, because they fainted and were scattered abroad 
as sheep having no shepherd. 

** Now in addressing such an audience I have not 
felt once the spirit of rebuke; have not uttered an 
ironical or sarcastic expression; have not struck one 
stroke at an antagonist, or spoke as if I was aware 
that there were any hearing who thought differently 
from myself. 

'* I have taken the course of luminous exposition 
calculated to prevent objections, and applied closely, 
as to its experimental bearings, on conscience and 
heart, and held up in various forms the experience 
of renewed and unrenewed men, enabling Christians 
to feel that they have religion, and compelling sin- 
ners to concede that they have not." (1:483.) 

He could appreciate others and use them. If good 
was done, he cared little by whom, or who had the 
credit for it. He made all around him feel they 
were necessary to him. And so he had the elements 
of true leadership. He was once asked why liis 
Boston ministry was so largely useful, and he an- 
swered, " I preach on Sunday and the 500 members 
of my church are practicing all the week." 

It is hardly safe to illustrate some of the qualities 
of this noble preacher from the printed page. The 
speaking man is not here, the intense conviction, the 
fiery zeal, the thrilling voice. Take the sermon on 
duelHng — for the eager, nervous style, the mingled 
flashes of reason and scorn. ** What has torn yonder 
wretches from the embraces of their wives and chil- 
dren, and driven them to the field of blood — to the 
confines of hell? What nerves those arms, rising 
to sport with life and heaven? It is honor; the pledge 



68 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

of patriotism, the evidence of rectitude! Ah! it is 
done! The blood streams, and the victim welters on 
the ground. And see the victor coward running from 
the field, and for a few days, like Cain, a fugitive 
and a vagabond, until the first burst of indignation 
has passed, and the hand of time has soothed the 
outraged sensibility of the community; then, publicly, 
and as if to add insult to injustice, returning to offer 
his services, and to pledge his honor, that your lives 
and your rights shall be safe in his hand." (2 : 39.) 

He was essentially a logical preacher — he never 
called for action or appealed to feeling until he had 
abundantly instructed the reason — but it was always 
logic on fire with holy desire. Any of the published 
sermons, The Bible a Code of Laws, The Building 
of Waste Places, The Government of God, The Faith 
once delivered to the Saints, will illustrate the com- 
bined argument and enthusiasm of his sermons. 

The secret of Lyman Beecher's power as preacher 
and religious leader, as far as such power can be 
put in a single term, is vitality. His son-in-law, Dr. 
Stowe, has given the reason for his wide and benefi- 
cent influence — ** because he was a man always 
most thoroughly in earnest, of strong powers of ob- 
servation, a marvelous fertility and facility of illus- 
tration, and living every moment under the impres- 
sion that he had a great work to do for God and man, 
which must be done at once, not a minute to be 
lost." (2:576.) 

And Dr. Bacon adds, *' If I were to sum up the 
character of his eloquence in one word, that one word 
would be electricity. Even now, if you read atten- 
tively one of those great sermons in which his soul 
still speaks, you see this quality. The whole sequence 



LYMAN BEECHER 69 

of thought, from paragraph to paragraph is charged 
alike with meaning and with feeHng, and each link 
of the chain sparkles with electric fire." Lyman 
Beecher was a vitalized personality. 



IV 

WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING 

Studies of the American preacher deal chiefly with 
the orthodox pulpit. But the men considered are 
original and independent natures, some of them with 
a touch of genius ; so it is inevitable that they should 
see truth in new light, sometimes leaving the beaten 
path of men, and several have been under suspicion 
for unsound doctrine. The great majority, however, 
have confessed the CathoHc creeds and have been in 
the line of the development of the historic faith. 

But it would be an imperfect treatment of the 
American pulpit to ignore a movement that has 
touched some of our best minds in literature and the 
State, that in proportion to its numbers has had a 
notable pulpit, that has left its helpful mark both by 
action and reaction upon all churches, and has con- 
tributed to the higher intellectual and social life of 
the nation. 

William Ellery Channing and Theodore Parker are 
the most notable preachers and exponents of the Uni- 
tarian faith. The Unitarian movement is too large 
and complex for even a brief survey, but two or three 
facts must be kept in mind if we would interpret 
aright men like Channing and Parker. 

There were many single and individual reactions 
from Calvinism as early as the middle of the seven- 
teenth century, especially from the doctrine of the 

79 



WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING 71 

Trinity, Total Depravity, and the Atonement. The 
number was multiplied and religious thought widely 
affected by the spirit of civil liberty following the 
American and French Revolutions. Calvinism was 
connected with civil liberty, freedom from human 
tyranny demanded by the rule of God, Theocracy 
placed above monarchy. There was great faith in 
God, not so much faith in man. But the democratic 
movement was the assertion of the worth and right 
of the individual and soon protested against hard and 
fast lines in creed and church as well as in govern- 
ments. And to this must be added the idealism of 
German philosophy, that in the serious and spiritual 
mind of New England flowered into the transcen- 
dentalism of Concord and the Brook Farm. Here 
you have reasons enough for the rapid modification 
of the older theology and the growth of so-called 
liberal religion. In England the Unitarians were 
largely the outgrowth of the Presbyterians ; in New 
England, of the Congregationalists ; in England they 
were frankly Socinian, in New England mostly Arian 
and not as yet ready to accept the Unitarian name. 
At the beginning of the nineteenth century a majority 
of the clergy of New England had accepted the newer 
views, though the fellowship of the churches had not 
yet been broken. The religious life of the time is 
thus described by the biographer of Theodore Parker: 
'' The doctrines of the Puritan theology had lost their 
hold on an unimaginative people; and with them the 
fervors of the evangelical spirit had declined. . . . 
Churches were closed to Whitefield before Parker was 
born. The seats of culture dreaded the influence of 
the famous preacher of revivals; heads of families 
were commonly church members, the younger people 



i^ 



72 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

seldom; family prayers were infrequent; grace before 
meat was unusual; the clergyman was respected as a 
man of education; the Sabbath was observed punctu- 
ally; the Bible was read; but the soul of the Protes- 
tant faith had fled." 

The Unitarian controversy that followed revived 
the evangelical spirit and put an earnest soul under 
the formality of liberal thought. 

Channing was the chief personal force in the Uni- 
tarian development. Though never a radical Uni- 
tarian and for a long time holding to many evangel- 
ical doctrines, it was his famous Baltimore sermon 
that crystallized the elements of thought widely dif- 
fused into a definite Unitarian faith. Though never 
a partisan, and willing to fellowship a good life of 
any creed and church, it was his action that influ- 
enced the forming of the first Unitarian Association. 
By his rare and beautiful personality, by his noble 
thought and persuasive manner, he gave distinction 
to the new movement and was an inspiration to 
younger men. 



The early forces that turned Channing's thought in 
the liberal way are not very hard to find. His boy- 
hood was passed in Newport, Rhode Island, under 
orthodox teachings but in a spirit of charity and 
breadth characteristic of the community from the time 
of Roger Williams. The teachers of his boyhood 
w^ere Ezra Stiles, afterwards President of Yale, noted 
for his comprehensive spirit, and Dr. Hopkins, the 
hero of '' The . Minister's Wooing," whose doctrine 
of virtue as disinterested benevolence gave his name 
to a school of thought. With such masters Channing 



WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING 73 

might have developed and glorified the old orthodoxy 
save for other influences that gave a distinct trend 
to his life. 

He was a young idealist, with a passion for good- 
ness and a tender heart that would not crush '' the 
meanest insect that crawls," to whom the finding of a 
bird's nest with the little ones killed was a veritable 
tragedy. He thus refers to the influence of the sea- 
shore upon his childhood : *' No spot on earth has 
helped to form me so much as that beach. There I 
lifted up my voice in praise amidst the tempest. 
There, softened by beauty, I poured my thanksgiving 
and contrite confessions. There, in reverential sym- 
pathy with the mighty power around me, I became 
conscious of power within. There struggling thoughts 
and emotions broke forth, as if moved to utterance 
by nature's eloquence of the winds and waves. There 
began a happiness surpassing all worldly pleasures, 
all gifts of fortune, the happiness of communing 
with the works of God." Here was the sense of God 
in his world and of the goodness of life that easily 
grew into the proportions of his creed and that ab- 
sence of the sense of weakness and sinfulness that 
makes the thought of the Christ welcome to most 
serious minds. 

An incident of his boyhood reveals his nature and 
gives a strong trend to his beliefs. The father had 
taken the boy with him in his chaise to hear a famous 
preacher at some distance. The sermon was full of 
vivid descriptions of man's fallen state and the awful 
penalties to be visited upon the impenitent. " In view 
of the speaker a curse seemed to rest upon the earth 
and darkness and horror to veil the face of nature." 
The boy's mind was terribly impressed and he felt 



74 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

that all who heard the preacher must have similar 
impressions. His father's word to a friend on leav- 
ing the church, " Sound doctrine, sir," only deepened 
his impression. *' It is all true, then," he thought, 
and the boy's heart became like lead. He tried to 
speak to his father and could not. The father's 
silence made the boy think that the father too was 
brooding over these terrible things. But when at last 
the father began to whistle, the boy received a great 
moral shock. And worse still, when the father got 
home, he put on his slippers and settled down into 
an easy chair before the open fire, the very sight of 
which should have made him feel uncomfortable, and 
was soon lost in his paper as though nothing had 
happened. At once the boy reasoned, '' Could what 
he had heard be true? No; his father did not believe 
it; people did not beHeve it. It was not true." And 
this incident gave a permanent direction to his thought. 
One other fact of his youth had direct influence 
upon his career. His father, a lawyer and public 
man, was a graduate of Princeton, and as a loyal 
alumnus intended to have his son go to the same 
college. But the father's sudden death placed the 
education of the son largely under the influence of 
his mother's family who were all associated with 
Harvard. So Harvard became his Alma Mater, and 
his education strengthened the growth of liberal ideas 
already begun. His latest biographer, Mr. Chadwick, 
can not refrain from imagining the change in the 
religious condition of New England had young Chan- 
ning gone to Princeton and become subject to its con- 
servative influence. 



WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING 75 



It is not hard to trace the growth and expression 
of Channing's thought. The young idealist found 
kindred suggestions in his reading and in his work. 
He read Hutcheson under the willows at Cambridge 
and caught the vision of the *' dignity of human 
nature/' henceforth the fountain light of all his seeing. 
He read Adam Ferguson's Essay on Civil Society 
and caught the enthusiasm for social progress and the 
idea of moral perfection. His experience as a teacher 
in Richmond, Virginia, his knowledge of the evils 
of slavery beneath the graces of a slave-holding so- 
ciety, heightened his moral earnestness, his passion 
for moral goodness. 

Somewhat uncertain in his view at first, his first 
sermons are evangelical in spirit, with more than one 
Puritan note. He was welcome in all pulpits, and no 
party could say, *' He is one of us." And yet from 
the early sermons one can gather passages that are 
prophetic of his full message. 

From the first he dwelt upon the Fatherhood of 
God, which afterwards became his mastering thought. 
'' No character could bring God so nigh as this of the 
Father. I fear it has been the influence of many 
speculations of ingenious men on the Divine char- 
acter to divest God of the paternal tenderness which 
is of all views most suited to touch the heart." 

His deflection from the traditional view of the 
Atonement, as a means of changing God, is seen at 
once : ** Mercy is an essential attribute of God, not 
an affection produced in Him by a foreign cause. 
His blessings are free, bestowed from a real love of 
His creatures, not purchased from Him and bestowed 



76 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

by another on those whose welfare He disregards." 
And in the early years rose clear and high the doc- 
trine that religion is a means of perfection. 

*' Do you ask in what this perfection consists? I 
answer in knowledge, in love, and in activity. The 
mind devoted to these ends is as happy as it is per- 
fect. Its happiness partakes of the purity and seren- 
ity of the divine felicity. Now this I conceive is 
the end of God, to bring His rational offspring to 
this perfect and blessed state, to give them the widest, 
clearest, and brightest views, to give them the strong- 
est, purest, most disinterested love, and to form them 
to the most vigorous and efficient exertion of all their 
powers in the promotion of the best designs." 

The development of his distinctive ideas, what has 
often been termed by his followers as his prophetic 
work, is marked by his growing distrust of theological 
precision, emphasis on character more than on creed, 
and increasing prominence to faith in the Fatherhood 
of God and the dignity of human nature. 

However, it was not until Channing was 35 years 
old and had been preaching more than twelve years 
that he was brought to take a definite position as 
a Unitarian leader. This was due to an article in 
The Panoplist by Jeremiah Evarts (father of Senator 
Evarts) denying the name Christian and Christian 
fellowship to all Unitarians. In answer to this Chan- 
ning put all the passion of his soul into a plea for a 
ministry of reconciliation. " For myself the Universe 
would not tempt me to bear a part in this work of 
dividing Christ's Church and of denouncing his fol- 
lowers. If there be an act, which above all others, 
is a transgression of Christian law, it is this." And 
he speaks of the " immeasurable distance " that is 



WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING yy 

supposed to divide Unitarians from Trinitarians as 
little more than a ** mist of obscure phraseology." In 
one of the letters of his later life he is quoted as say- 
ing : '' I am more and more inclined to believe in the 
simple humanity of Jesus." But he never preached 
a mere human Jesus. His doctrine is hard to distin- 
guish from a progressive orthodoxy of to-day : *' We 
believe that Jesus Christ was the most glorious dis- 
play, expression, and representative of God to man- 
kind, so that in seeing him we see and know the in- 
visible Father; so that, when Christ came, God visited 
the world and dwelt among men more conspicuously 
than at any other period." Channing has a volume of 
sermons called " The Perfect Life " and no word was 
on his lips oftener than this : '' I believe that Chris- 
tianity has one great principle which is central, around 
which all its truths gather, and which constitute it the 
glorious gospel of the Blessed God: it is the doctrine 
that God purposes, in His unbounded Fatherly love, to 
perfect the human soul; to purify it from all sin; 
to fill it with His own spirit ; to unfold it forever." 

3 

The Preacher 

Channing was a very small, frail man, his early 
vigor seriously impaired by bad habits of work and 
ascetic practices. He gained a more wholesome view 
of life but never regained his early vigor. He always 
gave the impression of physical weakness. When he 
once told his friend Dr. Furness that he couldn't 
strike a man. Dr. Furness could not help wondering 
if the man would feel it if he did. 

But the slight physique was always covered with 



78 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

an ample pulpit gown and his neck swathed in the 
wonderful neck cloth of the day — so that as in the 
case of William CuUen Bryant with his Roman toga- 
like cloak, the audience was always impressed with 
the presence of the man. Of course the noble head 
and face, the richness and vitality of the truth, the 
enthusiasm of the man, and the voice — a perfect 
instrument of the thought — helped men to forget 
everything but the spiritual and vital personality. 

*' His voice — ah, that wonderful voice — wonder- 
ful not for the music of its tones, but for its extraor- 
dinary power of expression. Whether from the deli- 
cacy of the vocal organ or from bodily weakness, I 
do not know, it was flexible to tremulousness. When 
he began to discourse, it ran up and down, even in the 
articulation of a single polysyllabic word, in so strange 
a fashion that they who heard him for the first time 
could not anticipate its effect — how, before it ceased, 
that voice would thrill them to the inmost. I can not 
liken it to anything but a huge sail, flapping about at 
first at random, but soon taking the wind, swelling out 
most majestically, as Sidney Smith said of Sir James 
Mackintosh that * when the spirit came upon him, he 
spread his enormous canvas, and launched into a wide 
sea of eloquence.' " His reading of scripture and 
hymns was equally imprfessive. *' He made single 
words so big with meaning that could the eye have 
reproduced them, they would have covered the side 
wall of the church. He impressed the reality of his 
message and its importance for the lives of men. 
There was no question about the sincerity of the man 
in his preaching. He spoke his inmost soul in ser- 
mon and hymn and prayer. Preaching was the great 
action of his life'' (Dewey). One can easily find 



WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING 79 

fault with Channing's style from present taste. It has 
something of the '' smooth, watery, flow of words," 
and even Lord Brougham's criticism is not wholly 
wide of the mark, **flagrant example of euphuistic 
prettiness." 

We must remember that Channing was the prime 
mover in the new intellectual regime. He tried to do 
by his sermons and lectures what his almost equally 
famous brother did in the class room of Harvard — 
create an intellectual taste and standard. He was 
ever the conscious stylist in his writings. He thought 
too much of how it was done. But if you compare 
his style with contemporary writing — with the 
speeches and lectures of Webster and Choate, Win- 
throp and Everett — you must admit that he was the 
peer of the best of them. It was the time when the 
full, mellifluous, elaborate style was in vogue — the 
Latinized English of Johnson and Burke — rather 
than the nervous, direct, simple English of the early 
Puritan writers, or the business speech of our day. 

It must be admitted that his sermons are rather 
hard reading now, but not as much so as contem- 
porary sermons. He wanted to be real and often 
threw aside the classical garb and spoke with the 
direct, homely, idiom that anticipated Emerson and 
Wendell Phillips, and Abraham Lincoln. 

4 

His Message and Its Influence 

I have already more than suggested the message of 
Channing. The Fatherhood of God, the Sonship of 
Man, and the perfection of human life to be reached 
by the imitation of Jesus. How do we know God? 



8o THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

By striving after the qualities we think like God. 
" How do we understand the goodness of God but 
by the principle of love implanted in the human breast? 
Who can understand the strength, purity, fullness and 
extent of divine philanthropy, but he in whom selfish- 
ness has been swallowed up in love ? " 

As I have said, Channing was an idealist. He 
dwelt not in the world of men but in the world of 
ideas. His letters and his conversation were unevent- 
ful and impersonal. He had a vision of truth — like 
the spiritual worth of man, and this vision he kept 
before his mind by continued and rapt meditation, 
unmodified by other ideas or the facts of life. So 
while he denounced the evils of society, was a true 
reformer, he was a stubborn idealist, and was not 
specially conscious of the sinfulness of men. So the 
Atonement does not appear in his preaching, but he 
has the highest word for the character and claim of 
Christ. '* The Gospels must be true ; they were drawn 
from a living original; they were founded on reality. 
The character of Jesus is not a fiction; he was what 
he claimed to be, and what his followers attested. 
Nor is this all. Jesus not only was, he is still the Son 
of God, the Saviour of the World. He exists now; 
he has entered that heaven to which he always looked 
forward on earth. There he lives and reigns. With 
a clear, calm faith, I see him in that state of glory; 
and I confidently expect at no distant period to see 
him face to face. Let us then by imitation of his 
virtues, and obedience to his word prepare ourselves 
to join him in those pure mansions, where he is sur- 
rounding himself with the good and pure of our 
race, and will communicate to them forever his own 
spirit, power and joy.'' Here we have his loftiest 



WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING 8l 

and most characteristic note — in the appeal to imita- 
tion. The sermon on ** The Imitableness of Christ's 
Character " is perhaps as noble as he ever preached. 
*' Do not imagine that any faith or love towards Jesus 
can avail you but that which quickens you to conform 
yourselves to his spotless purity and unconquerable 
rectitude. For all of us he died, to leave us an ex- 
ample that we should follow his steps. By earnest 
purpose, by self-conflict, by watching and prayer, by 
faith in the Christian promises, by those heavenly aids 
and illuminations which he that seeketh shall find, 
we may all unite ourselves in living bonds to Christ 
— may love as he loved, may act from his principles, 
may suffer from his constancy, may enter into his 
purposes, may sympathize with his self-devotion to 
the cause of God and mankind, and, by likeness of 
spirit, may prepare ourselves to meet him as our ever- 
lasting friend." 

An appreciative and tolerant critic can easily find 
the limitation and weakness of Channing's message. 

He was completely under the sway of a few leading 
ideas. He had an acute self-consciousness, fostered 
by his isolated habits and the deference paid to him 
as a master mind. And so he spoke as if he enjoyed 
a special revelation. His opinions are announced as 
absolute truths. He tried to make everything simple 
and rational — and the standard is of his own reason. 
Even his friendly biographer recognizes the weakness 
as applied to the vast materials of the Scripture. 
** The vice of the method was that it imposed common 
sense on every Biblical writer — a rule of thumb for 
agonies and exaltations of the spirit." 

And a Jewish Rabbi keenly says : *' Though he 
always meant to speak as a disciple, he in truth spoke 



82 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

as a master." He saw only what would satisfy his 
own ideal. Everything was not so simple as he 
thought it was. More humility before the mystery of 
Godliness would have helped him to understand more 
and to walk more reverently. 

I do not think it always fair to judge a man by 
the teachings of those who call themselves his dis- 
ciples. But at least we see in them to what lengths 
the interpretation or misinterpretation of the master 
may be carried. No doubt in the freer and calmer 
air of to-day his protest to received opinion would 
not have gone so far and he would have lived and 
died in the fellowship of the evangelical church. 

He did a work that had to be done in bringing 
Christ down from a theological height to dwell with 
men — to make the Lord and Master of Mankind an 
elder brother in fact. And we must bless him for 
teaching the spiritual capacity of man and for show- 
ing the adaptation of the Gospel to the development 
of the largest, noblest manhood. His perfect life and 
Henry Drummond's ideal life are the same. But he 
failed in the redemptive message of the Gospel, that 
the mystery of the Divine life of love and power has 
been brought to men to lift them up. 

The sense of falling short in the interpretation of 
the person of Jesus has been frankly expressed by the 
letter of Dr. James Martineau, the eminent leader of 
English Unitarians : *' Your experience confirms my 
growing surmise that the mission which had been con- 
signed to us by our history is likely to pass to the 
Congregationalists in England and the Presbyterians 
in Scotland. Their escape from the old orthodox 
scheme is better than ours. With us, insistence upon 
the simple humanity of Jesus has come to mean the 



WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING 83 

limitation of all divineness to the Father, leaving man 
a mere item of creaturely existence under laws of 
natural necessity. 

'* With them the transfer of emphasis from the 
Atonement to the Incarnation means the retention of 
a divine essence in Christ, as the head and type of 
humanity in its realized idea; so that man and life 
are lifted into kinship with God, instead of what had 
been God being reduced to the scale of mere nature. 

" The union of the two natures in Christ resolves 
itself into their union in man and links heaven and 
earth in relations of a common spirituality. 

'* It is easy to see how the divineness of existence, 
instead of being driven off into the heights beyond 
life, is there brought down into the deeps within it, 
and diffuses there a multitude of sanctities that would 
else have been secularized. 

'* Hence the feeling of reverence, the habits of piety, 
the aspirations of faith, the hopes of immortality, the 
devoutness of duty, which have so much lost their 
hold upon our people, remain real powers among the 
liberalized orthodox, and enable them to carry their 
appeal home to the hearts of men in a way the secret 
of which has escaped from us." 

Channing's doctrine of the worth of human nature 
and the purpose of Christianity to make that nature 
perfect led him to apply the Gospel to every concern 
of man, to every institution of society. And here 
is where his work is the freest from alloy. We must 
be grateful for it. The fullness of the kingdom is 
manifestly nearer because of it. No man taught the 
ethics of the Gospel better than he did. And there 
was need, when human slavery was the legal and 
cherished institution of the two most Christian nations 



84 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

of the world. He studied the questions of labor and 
poverty and spoke with many anticipations of modern 
sociology. He had the social consciousness — not 
even yet developed in all ministers. 

He discussed the evils of intemperance with a clear- 
ness and fearlessness never surpassed, and with a 
breadth of view, showing the relation of industrial 
questions and those of recreation to intemperance and 
its cure, that after two generations of experiments, 
the wisest students of society are now considering. 

With his pure vision he saw the terrible evils of 
slavery, and he did not forbear — but cried aloud, but 
he did not satisfy either party. He lived in ideals 
rather than in actions. He saw the other side too well 
to be a practical reformer. He hesitated until he 
could also reach the ideal action. 

" Channing's anti-slavery course had the defects of 
his qualities, if they were defects. To hear the other 
side was as necessary for him, as to hear one side only 
is for the majority of men. To consider it again was 
equally necessary. His was the Hamlet disposition, 
rightly understood — a holding back from action in 
the hope of reaching its ideal form. Hence he was 
slower than some others in the adoption of radical 
measures. But as compared with the average temper 
of the community of his co-religionists, of his people, 
he was so free and bold that it scandalized the social 
and religious Boston of his time. Good people won- 
dered what he would do next. So, then, considering 
his shrinking delicacy of form and mind, his distaste 
for all rough contact, his holy fear of doing injustice 
to any person, or another's thought, his conservative 
environment, and the sacrifice of reputation, honor, 
and affection entailed by his anti-slavery course, it 



WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING 85 

may be doubted whether any of his contemporaries 
did out his duty in a more steadily, heroic fashion, 
or at a heavier cost." ^ 

How echoes yet each western hill 

And vale with Channing's dying word ! 

How are the hearts of freedom still 

By that great warning stirred ! — Whittier. 

1 Chadwick's " Life of Channing/' 294. 



V 

HORACE BUSHNELL 

There is no more striking example in the American 
pulpit of ** Truth through personality " than Horace 
Bushnell. His nature and experience, his person- 
ality, gave him his truth, colored its form, and gave 
power to every expression of it. The man was always 
present. And yet the man loved truth supremely. 
He writes among his last words '' that the only ground 
of satisfaction that he knew was that he loved truth, 
and had tried to find it out." 

His nature, the outer and inner experience of his 
life, are writ large in letters and books and sermons. 
It has been said that his sermons to his own people — 
such sermons as you find in the volume *' Sermons 
for the New Life " — are great Gospel messages and 
reveal few traces of the original and seer-like visions 
and speculations that characterize his occasional ad- 
dresses and made them critical days for himself and 
the New England church. But I can not agreed with 
the statement. It seems to me a superficial estimate. 

He was always Horace Bushnell and the elements 
of power in his preaching were the very things that he 
had felt more profoundly than other men, or thought 
that he saw more clearly. I wish to speak about the 
preacher and not the theologian. Yet vitality and 
sincerity are such unvarying notes — everything that 

86 



HORACE BUSHNELL 87 

he said was so connected with everything that he was, 
that to write truly of the preacher, one ought to know 
fully the thinker. 

It is an inspiring thought that such a man, so richly 
endowed, so influential in the higher life of our na- 
tion, could spring from the simple and bare life of a 
New England farm. It was the life of the farm that 
helped in no small part to make him what he was. He 
is essentially an out of doors man. He has the free- 
dom of the fields and in his rhythmical speech there 
is something of the music of the streams he loved. 
He is redolent of fields and forest, and never has the 
odor of musty books. It sharpened and gave large 
play for the natural inquisitiveness of the youth. He 
knew every wood note, every tree in the forest, and 
the curious and beautiful life that grew along his na- 
tive streams. This interest in nature he never lost. 
While kept by his many labors amid physical weakness 
from pursuing any scientific study, he followed the 
results of such study with intelligent interest. With 
all his mystic visions, he kept his feet firmly on the 
earth. Nature might almost be called the key to his 
thought. He kept his feet on the earth and from this 
solid base he tried to view the stars. He reasoned 
from the world of sense and spirit that he knew to 
the higher realm where imagination must lead the 
way. His desire was to find the divine unity, to har- 
monize all ideas of God and Redemption with the 
nature of things — to make men feel that there was 
one world, one law, one love, and one *' far oflf divine 
event to which the whole creation moved." His 
thought was governed by the naturalness of the proc- 
esses of grace. '' His rehgious impressions came along 
the path of nature, in the fields and pastures, and so 



88 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

coming they were without fear or sense of wrong, but 
full of the divine beauty and majesty." ^ 

The solitary life of the country made the youth ' 
thoughtful, meditating much upon his own nature, the 
truths of religion and the impressions upon his soul 
of the spiritual meaning and beauty of the world. He 
learned to feel with Wordsworth that the forms and 
forces that he daily saw and felt should have some 
message and help for the soul. He had a simple and 
natural piety in his home, but the first strong sense of 
God came to him from nature, and he knelt in the 
shadow of a great rock in the field to pour out his soul 
to the Eternal One. 

. . . And I have felt 
A presence that disturbs me with the joy 
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime 
Of something far more deeply interfused, 
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
And the round ocean and the living air, 
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: 
A motion and a spirit, that impels 
All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
And rolls through all. 

He loved the beautiful scenes of his youth and in 
later years returned to them with a boy's eagerness, 
and nourished his faith by them, and calmed the tumult 
of soul and had clearer views of truth. He loved the 
world for its Hght and beauty, but it was the message 
to the soul that he most cared for. He had a summer 
in Switzerland and never enjoyed so much in so short 
a time ; but he is frank to say that ** none of these 
things move me unless when I connect the visible with 

1 " Life of Bushnell," by T. T. Hunger. 



HORACE BUSHNELL 89 

the invisible, and see in the forms of grandeur around 
me types of that tremendous Being who inhabits and 
glorifies all." It was faith that gave him eyes, but 
the power of vision is connected with his love of na- 
ture. 

He grew sturdy and original and independent by 
his youth in the country, as a tree in the open field, 
unsupported and unaided by others has room for 
stronger growth and by very exposure to storm and 
sun draws deeper life from the soil and the air. From 
early years he was conscious of power — awakened 
first in the country school house, and cherished by dis- 
cussions in theology and by the debating club; but he 
declined the ofifer of a college training as a world not 
meant for him, and as beyond the means of his fam- 
ily. He gave his young manhood to the farm, apply- 
ing his fertile and original mind to its work, plant- 
ing and sowing and building walls that still stand so 
perfect was their workmanship, trying to know his 
neighborhood, its soil and drainage and climate and 
productions before the day of scientific agriculture. 

So he was a man grown, physically and mentally, 
before he entered college. And when he began his 
studies at Yale at the age of twenty-one, it was with 
a nature that had already taken its distinctive steps, 
gained its distinguishing marks. So college training 
imposed nothing upon him of social or mental habit; 
it did not fashion him in the molds of other men's 
thought or custom, but simply quickened and matured 
his native vigor. 

And this was Horace Bushnell all through his life. 
He trusted the processes of his own mind, he believed 
in the messages of God to his soul. He never asked 
what other people thought or whether his views would 



90 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

find acceptance with the majority of the Church. It 
was enough that this seemed truth to him. He fol- 
lowed it, though it led from the beaten path of men 
to unknown ways. A more independent and loyal 
soul never lived. And you can see how his course 
grew out of his nature, developed and strengthened 
by the peculiar circumstances of his youth. 

He was too independent of others, sometimes fail- 
ing to have the proper perspective to his thinking that 
comes from familiarity with the history of doctrine. 
He had little respect for great libraries, and held that 
the burning of the Alexandrian library was an un- 
doubted blessing to the race. He was wanting in rev- 
erence for human authority, but not wanting in the 
reverence of faith. 

In the intense and often bitter discussions that gath- 
ered about him for a score of years, he was singularly 
unmoved, not only because he had gained the victory 
of the forgiving spirit, but because of his independ- 
ence of human opinion, and his supreme faith in the 
triumph of truth at last — whatever that might be. 

He was by nature an explorer. His life shows it, 
and even in the smallest things. As a boy he knew 
all the woods and streams, and had gone to the sum- 
mits of the highest hills. He never passed through 
a country without mapping it all out in his own mind. 
During a vacation in California for his health, he ex- 
plored no less than half a dozen sites for the proposed 
University of California, and decided the proper route 
for a transcontinental railroad through the Sierras. 
When an invalid with but a single lung, followed by 
his young friend, Jos. Twitchell, he made a new and 
better trail to the summit of Mt. Marcy in the Adiron- 
dacks. He was always cutting new paths through 



HORACE BUSHNELL 91 

forests and climbing to the tops of the highest moun- 
tains. He was ever getting up and beyond. He was 
never content with the old, he must have the new, and 
it was to be expected that with such a nature the new 
was usually the better. The sad age never came to 
him when 

... a flower is just a flower: 
Man, bird, beast are but beast, bird, man — 
Simply themselves, uncinct by dower 
Of dyes which, when life's day began. 
Round each in glory ran, . . . 

He was an explorer, an experimenter in the regions 
of spiritual life as well as in the physical. It was the 
indomitable bent of his nature. And whether we can 
follow the leadings of such men or not, we can have 
no doubt that God makes great use of them in making 
others dissatisfied with easy and conventional faith 
and leading to deeper realities. 

In his own words Horace Bushnell has given us an 
unconscious portrait of himself : '* There are some 
of all ages — a holy few whose lives have been pre- 
served to us in writing and tradition, and who thus 
live among us still as known causes, who are not si- 
lent, whose names and works and Christian character 
are ever freshened and made more vigorous by the 
lapse of time. God has saved these elect men to us 
by means of written language, that we may ever have 
them with us, and look to them as our lights of love 
and truth. They were God's experimenters, I may 
say, in all their struggles and trials and works, and so 
God's witnesses; and therefore it is expected that we 
shall go naturally to them for help and life-direction, 
as one who could open a mine will seize upon the 



92 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

instructive suggestions of an experienced miner. 
They were the true miners of faith, and we may go 
to them to be told where the treasures of faith do lie, 
and how they may be opened." 

We must go a step farther, and the most important 
of all, if we would touch the personality of this man 
and know how his experience spoke in his word. The 
theology of New England was essentially rationalism 
crystallized into dogmas. That is, the Fathers, from 
Jonathan Edwards to Nathaniel Tayler, had used their 
reason as the instrument of spiritual knowledge, think- 
ing out the great problems of God and man and the 
plan of salvation and the procedure of the Holy Spirit 
with an awakened soul, and had put these into formal 
and supposedly consistent statement, and made them 
the creeds of the churches and the limits of thought 
and life in religion. 

Horace Bushnell, the child of a Methodist and an 
Episcopalian, was nurtured at home in the warm at- 
mosphere of Christian love and never passed through 
the orthodox experience of deep conviction, and the 
struggle of an evil heart and final surrender to God. 
He knew nothing of this. His days were bound each 
to each by natural piety. This beautiful home life 
speaks in his volume on '' Christian Nurture." And 
as a lad he joined the Church as the natural expres- 
sion of his life. As his mind matured, logic and 
imagination seemed equally dominant. He loved argu- 
ment. He put the logical processes first. He rea- 
soned out the chief doctrines of Calvinism. And the 
whole field of religion seemed plain enough to him. 
And in this settled and steady faith he went to col- 
lege with the ministry in view. Reason was the great 
instrument of faith. But the very defender of faith 



HORACE BUSHNELL 93 

was its betrayer. New studies opened a broad hori- 
zon. Experience revealed new powers of his nature 
with which he had not reckoned. Philosophic ques- 
tions refused to be stated under old formulas. Rea- 
son that once saw so straight and clear, now pain- 
fully groped, and finally refused to be the guide of 
faith. Reason left him in doubt. It was honest doubt, 
the failure to use all the faculties of faith. But 
through it all he maintained his sense of right, keep- 
ing his conscience clear, never irreverent, guarding 
against leading others into unbelief. 

Tennyson's words concerning Arthur Hallam at 
once come to mind as equally true of young Horace 
Bushnell : 

One indeed I knew 
In many a subtle question| versed, 
Who touched a jarring lyre at first, 
But ever strove to make it true: 
Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds. 
At last he beat his music out. 

Such was Horace Bushnell through years of study 
and teaching, unable to bring his reason to accept the 
truths of Christianity, and not willing to break with 
Christianity ^ leading a correct, formal and unsatis- 
fying life. 

Great religious interest was felt at Yale. Bushnell 
had become an instructor. He could honestly take 
no part in it. And yet his neutral position, as a 
tutor of commanding influence, was not neutral, and 
was keeping scores of young men from faith. His 
pride of intellect was humbled before this sense of 
fraternal relation. He began at the plain standpoint 
of conscience and duty and put the test question to 



94 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

his own heart : ** Have I ever consented to be, and 
am I really now, in the right, as in principle and 
supreme law; to live for it; to make any sacrifice it 
will cost me; to believe everything that it will bring 
me to see; to be a confessor of Christ as soon as it 
appears to be enjoined upon me; to go on a mission 
to the world's end if due conviction sends me; in a 
word, to be in wholly right intent, and have no mind 
but this forever?" As soon as the moral questions 
were given weight, he took his place on the side of 
faith. 

One day he came into a meeting of fellow-tutors 
and, throwing himself into a seat, he cried out almost 
desperately : *' O men ! what shall I do with these 
arrant doubts I have been nursing for years? When 
the preacher touches the Trinity, and when logic shat- 
ters it all to pieces, I am all at the four winds. But 
I am glad I have a heart as well as a head. My heart 
wants the Father; my heart wants the Son; my heart 
wants the Holy Ghost — and one just as much as the 
other. My heart says the Bible has a Trinity for 
me, and I mean to hold by my heart. I am glad that 
a man can do it when there is no other mooring, and 
so I answer my own question — What shall I do ? 
But this is all I can do yet." This might be called 
a conversion, but it was not strictly speaking. He did 
not discredit his early faith. But it was the begin- 
ning of rich spiritual experiences that made the full- 
ness of the joy and the power of his word. Love, 
trust, aspiration, the sense of duty are henceforth the 
supreme factors of his life and the organs of spiritual 
knowledge. Without them reason — divine gift as it 
is — is only a wandering fire. He came back to the 
lessons of his Christian nurture, which reason had 



HORACE BUSHNELL 95 

misread. His life was unconsciously swayed by the 
faith hid in his mother's heart. He learned the truth 
of Melanchthon and Schleiermacher, that " the heart 
makes the Theologian." ** He had been delivered by 
his heart, and henceforth he was to be guided by his 
heart, and not by the logic that filled the air about 
him." ('Hunger.) Henceforth truth is known not 
by speculative reason but by the experience of trust 
and devotion. Experience is henceforth the means 
of faith. '' I have learned more of experimental re- 
ligion since my little boy died than in all my life be- 
fore." 

Marked stages of experience stand back of every 
new expression of doctrine. 

The year 1848, says his wife, was the central point 
in the life of Horace Bushnell. '* It was a year of 
great experiences, great thoughts, great labors. At 
the beginning he had reached one of those headlands 
where new discoveries open to the sig'ht. He had ap- 
proached it through mental struggles, trials and prac- 
tical endeavors, keeping his steadfast way amid all 
the side attractions of his ceaseless mental activity." 
He had been attracted to the writings of Upham and 
Madame Guyon and Fenelon by their devout fervor 
and unworldly standards. And then he had found 
in the New Testament that there is a higher, fuller 
life — that can be lived, and set himself to attain it. 
He swung towards Quietism, and then with his self- 
reliant, energetic nature, to a more positive state. 

** In these studies, and in the devout application by 
which he sought to realize in his own experience the 
great possibilities unfolding to his conception, the new- 
year came in. On an early morning of February, his 
wife awoke, to hear that the light they had waited 



96 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

for, more than they that watch for the morning, had 
risen indeed. She asked, What have you seen? He 
replied, The Gospel. It came to him at last, after all 
his thought and study, not as something reasoned out, 
but as an inspiration — a revelation from the mind of 
God himself." It was the thought of Christ as the 
indwelling, formative life of the soul — the new cre- 
ating power of righteousness for humanity. And this 
conception, pervading his sermons, was more ade- 
quately set forth in his book, '* God in Christ." 

He himself regarded this as a crisis in his spiritual 
life. *' I seemed to pass a boundary," he said. '' I 
had never been very legal in my Christian life, but 
now I passed from those partial seeings, glimpses and 
doubts, into a clearer knowledge of God and into His 
inspirations, which I have never lost. The change 
was into faith, a sense of the f reeness of God and the 
ease of approach to Him. Christian faith is the faith 
of a transaction. It is not the committing one's 
thought in assent to any proposition, but the trusting 
of one's being to a being, there to be rested, kept, 
guided, molded, governed and possessed forever." 
This faith made a new man of him — rather invested 
him with a divine atmosphere. 

Hence he tried to show the inner experiences of the 
soul and to set them in orderly form: to show the 
reason of faith and the orderly way in which the most 
supernatural workings of God are carried on. 

He belonged to no school except Christ's school, 
and in this inner experience of Christ he hoped to 
find the mediating element between conflicting schools 
of opinion. In this hope he gave his noted sermon 
at Harvard on The Atonement — the seed thought of 
the '' Vicarious Sacrifice " — that it was the power 



HORACE BUSHNELL 97 

working in us the spirit of self-sacrifice and so bring- 
ing us into at-onement with God. It was this that 
gave him so catholic sympathies, finding spiritual af- 
finity in men of such antipodal theology as Dr. Bartol 
of Boston and Charles G. Finney of OberHn. 

In a sermon to his people on his twenty years' min- 
istry he estimates the power value of experience. 
*' Christianity is opened to me now as a new heaven 
of truth, a supernatural heaven, wide as the firma- 
ment, possible only to faith — to that luminous, clear 
and glorious. This thing I have found, that it is not 
in man to think out a Gospel, or to make a state of 
light by phosphorescence at his own center. He can 
have the great mystery of godliness only as it is mir- 
rored in his heart by an inward revelation of Christ. 
Do the will and you shall know the doctrine — this is 
the truth I have proved by my days of experience." 

If God comes into vital experience of the soul, men 
may be inspired now — must be — as in times past. 
*' We have it clearly made out that there is, and is 
always to be, an inspired, in the sense of a spirit-led 
life, when the secret of the Lord will be in the soul, 
and Christ manifested as its light." *' There are two 
kinds of inspiration, the inspiration of character and 
the inspiration of use. To all men he gives the first 
inspiration, and to all men the last. But in the last 
they are not all wanted to be prophets, but some to 
be shoemakers and bankers. Are all prophets? Are 
all workers of miracles? No. It is even competent 
for him to say that he wants no more Scripture writ- 
ten, and he is the judge." 

Dr. Bushnell held that experience was a continuous 
revelation of God. In a letter from Clifton Springs 
to his wife he makes an outline of his experience and 



98 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

the truths unfolded : " I had some very fresh and 
delightful musings of the morning on the Vicarious 
Sacrifice in Believers. Following out the theme yes- 
terday morning for two hours before rising, I seemed 
to be set on by another great stage in my heart's life. 
I never saw so distinctly as now what it is to be a 
disciple, or what the key-note is of all most Christly 
experience. I think too that I have made my last dis- 
covery in this mine. First, I was led along into initial 
experience of God, socially and by force of the blind 
religional instinct in my nature; second, I was ad- 
vanced into the clear moral light of Christ and of 
God, as related to the principle of rectitude; third, 
I was set on by the inward personal discovery of 
Christ, and of God as represented in him ; now fourth, 
I lay hold and appropriate the general culminating fact 
of God's vicarious character in goodness, and of mine 
to be accomplished in Christ as a follower. My next 
stage of discovery will be when I drop the body and 
go home, to be with Christ in the conscious, openly 
revealed fellowship of a soul, whose affinities are with 
him." 

Whatever we may think about Dr. Bushnell's views 
of truth, and that they are full or final he was the 
last man to hold (he cared not to leave a system of 
thought, but a living conception that might be seed- 
thought to others) no one can doubt the reality of his 
soul-experiences and the depth and genuineness of 
his faith. He was transformed by it. He had the 
power of godliness. His prayers were even more than 
his sermons, the communings of one heart with an- 
other. 

There is nothing more striking in the history of 
worship than the impressions made upon the Yale 



HORACE BUSHNELL 99 

students by the prayers of Bushnell. '* Gaunt was 
he, gray, ashen of skin, thin- voiced till he got under 
way, stopping time and again to cough, no elocution, 
no rhetoric (albeit scarcely ever such rhetoric, soberly 
conceived), making us his by no ad capitandum themes, 
or illustrations, or metaphors ; the plainest, most 
matter of fact person that ever stood there. His in- 
vocation, which we could scarcely hear, would still 
us. The Scripture lesson, plain speech (as if uttered 
on yesterday's half-holiday) about some valiant soul, 
read as only one reads who dwells forever with reali- 
ties, would change our temper for the entire day. 
Then. the prayer. I can hear it yet. Nothing about 
Bushnell so holds me, though I cannot recall a sen- 
tence of it. You deemed, like Jacob at Bethel, that 
God was there. All conventions too were dissolved 
betwixt Him and you. Our seer must have held Him 
with his glittering eye. Then the great argument be- 
gan — a shorter pastoral prayer than we had ever 
heard, that spake to the Infinite as a man to his friend ; 
reverent but familiar ; grateful but self-respecting ; dic- 
tion the simplest, the weightest: hesitating not to as- 
sume for us responsibilities, nor to lay answering re- 
sponsibilities on God (you divined, now, how it was that 
Jacob had wrestled at face of God, and had success- 
fully thrown down his gauntlet before Jehovah) ; and 
done, as all straight, pregnant speech is done, soon, 
simply, confidently. The world has changed when 
you lift your head. To have heard Bushnell pray, 
and to have prayed even a very little with him, was 
already to have entered the world of spirit. Our Sa- 
viour's unique prayer life was explicable thereafter." ^ 

^Munger's "Life of Bushnell," p. 290. 



100 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

** The sense of dissent," say Austin Phelps, *' grew 
dim in my own mind when I came near to the inner 
spirit of the man. That was beautifully and pro- 
foundly Christlike/' 

In his last days, in the heat of fever, the very wan- 
derings of his mind were all towards God. '' He had 
traveled that way so long that he could not lose it in 
any mists of the brain." " Well, now " — they were 
his last words — '' we are all going home together ; 
and I say, the Lord be with you — and in grace — 
and peace — and love — and that's the way I have 
come along home." 

I have not left myself much time to speak of his 
preaching — distinctly as such. But I feel that I 
have really been speaking of the preacher all the while. 
If you should ask me for the one element that makes 
the sermons of Horace Bushnell peculiar and great — 
I should answer in one word — Experience. " I 
have seen, therefore have I spoken " gives the sermon 
its significance. 

You remember the description of Augustine's 
preaching in Kinsley's Hypatia : ** Well, whether 
or not, Augustine knew truths for all men, he at least 
knew sins for all men, and for himself as well as his 
hearers. There was no denying that. He was a real 
man right or wrong. What he rebuked in others, he 
had felt in himself, and fought it to the death-grip, 
as the flash and quiver of that worn face proclaimed." 
You feel the same grip in the sermons of Horace 
Bushnell. He lays bare your soul, its hidden motives 
and workings. He brings to your consciousness things 
you hardly dreamed were there and yet such as you 
recognize as yours. He introduces you to yourself, 
your deeper self, yes and your nobler self. And he 



HORACE BUSHNELL lOl 

reveals God in Christ, and traces the working of his 
spiritual law as only a man can ^ho has himself 
known. There is the realism of the witness. It is 
not the reasonings of his mind, the flow of his speech, 
but the gift of his Hfe. The life has not gone out 
of the sermons, though bound up in books. They are 
charged with personality: they come tingling with 
life. 

They are full of virility, as the man himself was. 
One might suppose that with the constant exalting 
of faith over reason, the trusting of the soul's desires 
as pathways to God, there might be undue manifesta- 
tions of emotion, sentiment unrestrained by judgment, 
realms of mystic thought where sensible minds could 
not and would not follow. But such is not the case. 
Harmony with nature is his great thought, and real- 
ism is the quality of both thought and style, but it is 
the larger realism. He is scientific in his method, 
that is he keeps his eye on what he holds to be facts, 
tracing the human side of truth, that which he could 
test by experience. He is bold and fearless and rugged 
in this method, combining reason and imagination, 
common sense and sentiment, and compelling men to 
think, trying to get under the outward appearances of 
things to the inner realities of the spirit, and thereby 
at the same time profoundly touching the emotions. 
Take the sermon on *' The Capacity of Religion Ex- 
tirpated by Disuse " — '" Take the talent from him " — 
as the example of his strength — the energy that moves 
on in accurate, fearless, sympathetic portrayal of the 
soul's experience. '* This deforming process is a 
halfing process, with all that are in it. It extermi- 
nates the noblest side of faculty in them, and all the 
most affluent springs of their greatness it forever dries 



102 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

away. It murders the angel in us, and saves the 
drudge or the worm. The man that is left is but a 
partial being, a worker, a schemer, a creature of pas- 
sion, thought, will, hunger, remorse; but no divine 
principle, no Kinsman of Christ, or of God. And 
this is the fearful taking away of which our blessed 
Lord admonishes; a taking away of the gems and 
leaving the casket, a taking away of the great, and 
leaving the little, a taking away of the godlike and 
celestial and a leaving of the sinner in his sin." 

Dr. Bushnell's sermons have kinship with poetry in 
that they are truth in the realm of the imagination. 
Imagination helps him to his vision of truth, and is the 
creative power that fixes the vision of the spirit in 
living form. Dr. Hawes of Hartford, the severe critic 
of Dr. BushneU's theology, felt that imagination was 
an unreal and misleading faculty in religion and was 
therefore to be checked and even suppressed. He 
also as a young man was given to imaginings, visions 
of the soul, glimpses of realms beyond the beaten path ; 
but he felt that they might be temptations of the evil 
one, taking the youth again to the pinnacle of the 
temple and showing him the kingdoms of the world. 
And so he took a course that fairly extirpated this 
faculty by disuse. His teaching was Scriptural in 
form, vigorously and conscientiously so, but it was 
hard, dogmatic, without the subtle persuasions of life. 
It is essentially rationalism. Nothing can be so un- 
real as logic. 

This gives comprehensiveness. *' The effect of my 
preaching never was to overthrow one school and set 
up the other; neither was it to find a position of neu- 
trality midway between them; but as far as theology 
was concerned, it was to comprehend if possible, the 



HORACE BUSHNELL I03 

truth contended for in both; in which I had of course 
abundant practice in the subtleties of speculative lan- 
guage, but had the Scriptures always with me, bolting 
out their free, incautious opposition, regardless of all 
subtleties." ^ 

The imagination is just as divine a faculty as rea- 
son. It adds force, clearness, distinctness of outline, 
vividness of coloring to man's ordinary conception. 
It flashes its way where reason painfully gropes and 
has important use in all the results of human thought. 
The generalizations of science could not be made with- 
out it. And without its aid the elements of religious 
truth cannot be harmonized. Imagination is the power 
of larger vision, a penetrative and interpretive power, 
seeing into the heart or towards the heart of things, 
and feeling the greatness of that still beyond its sight. 
It is not satisfied with perception. It is a faculty that 
combines, harmonizes and embodies the truths seen in 
immortal forms. And the imaginative insight gives 
a glow of heart, an inspiration that is the condition of 
the highest pulpit teaching. Emotion inseparably at- 
tends it, and so it makes its appeal to both intellect 
and feelings. 

The imagination is the creative and persuasive spirit 
of Dr. Bushneirs sermons. It helps him to his in- 
terpretation of Scripture fact and doctrine — his con- 
ception, and then puts that conception before us a 
living and life-giving whole. 

Such sermons as '' Every man's life a plan of God," 
the '* Dignity of human nature shown from its Ruins," 
the ** Power of an endless life," are in their own sphere 
of pulpit teaching as truly works of creative imagina- 

1 Munger, p. 54. 



104 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

tion as the Minerva of Phidias, the Madonna of Ra- 
phael, or the King Lear of Shakespeare. 

The style of Horace Bushnell is as original as the 
man. It is lacking in simplicity, sometimes awkward 
and involved in structure, struggling now and then 
after the unattainable, and then again under the pulse 
of imaginative feeling moving on in the stately, 
rhythmical flow of the highest eloquence. He did not 
cultivate peculiarity. He did not seek to be obscure. 
He had to think in his own way and he tried to make 
his language the form of the life — or to use his own 
figure, the shadow of the thought. That there are 
some shadows in it we must all feel. It has something 
of the mystery of his own being, and of the life of 
the spirit. It is a path moving on, mostly in the light, 
with many simple and interesting things close by the 
way — but now and then passing into the mist and 
storm cloud — with rifts into the infinite blue. 

" I have felt that our Dr. Bushnell would have 
helped the world to understand him faster, if he had 
not set an image in his almost every word like the 
face and flash of a diamond. Of course this is the 
peril of affluence, even as overflows are the peril of 
well- watered lands; but dear me! let us have waters 
anyhow. We will dam them. We will hew channels 
for them. And we had rather be drowned in them, 
than to dry up and die in the sand-wastes of a dic- 
tion absolutely and forever arid." ^ 

One of his children gives this interesting glimpse 
of the man in the pulpit : ** I could not better sug- 
gest a picture of him than by words of his own, 
which he applied to another — * His brow hangs heavy 

i"BurtoA Lectures," p. 117. 



HORACE BUSHNELL 105 

over his desk, and the glow of his majestic face and 
the clear luster of his meditative eye reveal the mighty 
soul discoursing with the inward oracle.' When kin- 
dled by a strong thought, his whole face glowed with 
a spiritual beauty; and, sometimes, in moments of 
deep feeling, the tears would spring unbidden to his 
eyes, and brim over as from a child's eyes, with a 
beautiful unconsciousness. How well I remember 
that nervous swing of the right arm, which set an 
exclamation point to an important sentence! It ex- 
pressed will, ardor, insistence, impulse — all in one 
motion. He carried a truth home by the momentum 
he gave it. His voice was naturally a good and strong 
one, but he never learned to manage it well, straining 
it sometimes, not by loudness but by emphasis, and 
doubtless laying thus the foundation of bronchial trou- 
ble. I think that in my childhood, I can remember 
his subdividing his sermons more than he did later, 
and giving them a more formal shape. A little boy 
once complained to me — * Your father said sixthly, 
and then he went back and said secondly/ This was 
indeed a grievous ground of complaint to a child who 
was impatiently waiting to hear seventhly and lastly/' 
The character of Dr. Bushnell, the vision and grace 
of the man, and his hold upon the men who knew him 
the best, is seen in the account of his last sermon. 
*' He was in very feeble health, and the signs of phys- 
ical distress were only too apparent in his speech and 
motions. When his part was called, he said in a very 
subdued and tender voice — ' Brethren, I am going to 
read you what is probably the last sermon I shall 
write,' and then he announced his subject, * Our rela- 
tions to Christ in the future life.' In the circum- 
stances the mere announcement of such a subject was 



lo6 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

enough to put us all in a state of tender awe. It did 
not seem boldness in him to be thus looking within the 
veil. We felt that he was to speak of what he knew, 
and not out of conjecture merely. As he read on and 
on, we listened with deepening awe and tenderness 
to the close. The shadow of the coming separation 
fell upon us, and when the reading ceased there was 
a strange silence. One by one the ministers, as they 
were called upon, declined to speak. Presently one 
was called who had long been intimate with the doc- 
tor, and when he shook his head, the doctor said, 
' Come, tell us what you think of it.' He hesitated, 
and then began, ' Dr. Bushnell tells us that this — is — 
his — last — sermon.' He could go no farther, but 
gave way and broke out into loud weeping. And we 
all wept together with him. It was like the parting 
of St. Paul with the Ephesian elders. Then we knew 
how we loved him, and what an unspeakable, irrepa- 
rable loss his departure would be for us — that de- 
parture which was evidently right at hand. The 
dear old doctor sat there, calmest of all, his deep, 
dark eyes glistening with tears, his face radiant like 
Stephen's, and beheld us with a look of heavenly 
grace and benediction, until the weeping ceased, and 
the Master seemed to have made Himself manifest in 
a great peace." 



VI 

HENRY WARD BEECHER 

Oliver Wendell Holmes is credited with the witty 
remark that mankind was divided into the '' saints and 
sinners and the Beecher family." It was when the 
Beecher family were very much in evidence. The fa- 
ther, Lyman Beecher, perhaps the most stalwart, in- 
dependent and aggressive minister of his time, had not 
ceased to thunder. His two daughters were among 
the famous women of America ; Catherine the older 
a writer of no mean strength and the pioneer in the 
higher education of women; Harriet (Mrs. Stowe) 
still the most creative female mind in American litera- 
ture. The seven sons were all ministers, each one 
strong in his way, and not unworthy of his sire 
or his kinship to the Plymouth pastor. Henry Ward 
Beecher, the eighth child of Lyman Beecher and Rox- 
anna Foote Beecher, had the gifts of the family in a 
marked and perfected degree. He is so original in his 
endowment, so exceptional in his experience and in- 
fluence, that he is easily distinguished from mankind, 
especially from his brethren in the ministry. He is 
many in one, and the many seem at times to speak 
contradictory voices. In fact he is a blending of con- 
tradictions or opposites. There is a profound melan- 
choly under a genial humor that plays over all like 
summer sunshine; a tenderness and sympathy with all 
from the highest to the lowest that brings tears to his 

107 



lo8 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

eyes at sight of a helpless child or a gull beating 
against a storm, with a scorn of men, an independence 
of judgment, that makes him the champion of un- 
popular but righteous causes and his words at times 
like thunder-bolts; an intellectual sensibility quick and 
powerful to discern the loftiest truths, with periods 
of apparent dullness and unproductiveness ; an imagi- 
nation which ** transforms heaven and earth into a 
radiant procession of pictures " with a hard common 
sense and practicality that handles the commonest mat- 
ters with ungloved hands ; a keen insight into char- 
acter, into its subtle and complex motives that made 
his pictures of life as realistic as Hogarth's; with an 
unsophisticated confidence in human nature that made 
him the dupe of any unprincipled sharper; an emo- 
tional nature that swept the whole power of his be- 
ing in any single motive ; with an ethical sense so fine 
and true that every truth was held in its relation to 
conduct and the powers of earth were helpless to 
deflect him from the path of duty. All these elements 
blended into one original, affluent, creative personal- 
ity. He was a many-sided genius. He has been 
called more than once the " Shakespeare of the Amer- 
ican pulpit." 

It may be hastily thought, what has such a man to 
do with us? He is a genius, one of the few excep- 
tional men of the pulpit, what help can he give to the 
rank and file of the ministry? It is a natural feeling 
but not warranted by the facts of Mr. Beecher's ex- 
perience and work. No American preacher can help 
us more, both by direct teaching and by suggested 
warning. His experience is full of the most practical 
lessons, and his life speaks with the inspiration of a 
lofty and devoted manhood. It is this purpose that 



HENRY WARD BEECHER I09 

guides the study of Mr. Beecher ; not so much the esti- 
mate of the preacher and orator as the lessons of his 
experience. 



The Preparation of the Man 

God prepared this man for his work; the prepara- 
tion was going on all through his life; each step was 
for the next, and is manifested as in few lives in 
character, message, and service. Notice the prepara- 
tion of birth and earfy training. His sister, Mrs. 
Harriet Beecher Stowe, in the sketch in *' Men of our 
Times," his son-in-law. Rev. Mr. Scoville, in '' Boy- 
hood Memorabilia,'' and Rev. Frank S. Child in the 
'* Boyhood of Henry Ward Beecher," have dwelt with 
suggestive analysis and incident upon these formative 
influences. His spiritual inheritance was from his 
mother, who died when he was three years old ; his 
love of beauty, his imagination, his subtle insight into 
truth and life, his quick and tender response to hu- 
man need. '* It was the mother's wish and prayer 
that her sons all devote themselves to the Gospel min- 
istry. The current of her faith flowed through the 
life-work of her children. And Henry Ward received 
double portion of her spirit." 

The training of his conscience came from his step- 
mother. She had a moral force, a dignity of de- 
meanor, an air of elegance, an inflexible conscience 
that produced unconscious awe in the minds of the 
little ones. '' She gave the strength of her imperious 
intellect to the task of guiding the children in the 
knowledge of right and truth and religion." Though 
the impression of religion was '* solemn and inflexible 



no THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

and mysteriously sad," it made conscience clear and 
imperative. The youngest of a large family had little 
attention, save discipline. There were no children's 
books and he did not have a single child's toy. Very 
early he had strict duties given him, in caring for the 
garden and barn and firewood. He inherited a robust 
constitution and the Spartan or rather Puritan train- 
ing early developed vigor, self-reliance and devotion 
to duty. " At nine years of age, in one of those win- 
ter droughts common in New England towns, he har- 
nessed the horse to a sledge with a barrel lashed 
thereon, and went of? alone three miles over the icy 
top of the town hill, to dip up and bring home a 
barrel of water from a distant spring. His only trial 
in the case was the humiliation of being positively 
commanded by his careful step-mother to wear his 
overcoat; he departed obedient, but with tears of 
mortification freezing on his cheeks, for he had re- 
corded a heroic vow to go through a whole winter 
without once wearing an overcoat." 

The practical and emotional side of his life was de- 
veloped by his friendship for a colored servant of the 
family, Charles Smith. He slept in the same room 
with him and found in him the real companionship 
of his boyhood. This negro servant would pray and 
read his Bible and comment upon all with such true 
spiritual insight and native wit as to make religion 
simple and natural. Mr. Beecher says ithat from 
Smith he first heard the Bible truly read. Old Testa- 
ment stories became real things. He caught the flavor 
of the Psalms. The ** fret and harassment of Puri- 
tan piety " was lessened, and sweet, happy thoughts of 
God stirred the child's mind. Who can doubt that 
here was the beginning of that broadening of religion 



HENRY WARD BEECHER III 

into truth for daily life that marked his teachings, and 
that interest in humble life, faith in its divineness, es- 
pecially the life of the poor and oppressed, that made 
Plymouth pulpit so strong a force for the freedom and 
elevation of the negro race. 

The fourth factor in the nature and early training 
of Beecher was the life of his father. Lyman Beecher 
was a man greatly absorbed in his work, in the study 
and discussion of high themes of theology, in the care 
of his church, in constant demand for special services 
outside his parish, in articles for newspapers and re- 
views. He was marked for the vigor of his intel- 
lectual life and the fervor of his piety. ** The great- 
est thing in the world is to save souls " was his most 
characteristic saying, and to this end the powers of 
mind and spirit were unweariedly devoted. Henry 
Ward not only inherited the intellectual capacity of 
his father but was molded by that intellectuality. It 
is true that Lyman Beecher did not have much to do 
directly in the training of his children, but such a 
personality dominated the home as it did the Church 
and society. A sensitive boy like his youngest son 
could not fail to be deeply impressed by the vigorous, 
versatile and noble mind and character of his father. 
To others there were no prophecies of future great- 
ness in the boy, slow of speech and rather dull of 
books, bubbling over with good nature and practical 
pranks, but with a heart of dreamy melancholy, but 
to the father's heart there was kinship of spirit. " The 
father began his instruction in mental mastery during 
Henry's early boyhood. He would argue some great 
question with the child, and when the child failed to 
substantiate his position, his father would tell him 
what he ought to say/' As the boy's mind grew iri 



112 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

grasp and wit, he would test him with problems and 
investigations. He would get him to marshal his 
ideas and theories while they tramped over the hills 
or fished the streams. And so he moved his mind into 
a '* generous and natural activity."' One Sabbath 
forty years after Henry Ward Beecher preached a 
most impressive sermon. A friend remarked to Ly- 
man Beecher, who was present in Plymouth Church, 
'' That was a magnificent discourse." " Yes," replied 
the Doctor with some childishness but more truth, 
** but you wouldn't have had that sermon if it hadn't 
been for me." *' And there is a larger truth in the 
saying of the venerable father than lies upon the sur- 
face of the words. Lyman Beecher lived in his great 
son. The intellectual forces which made Henry Ward 
Beecher a leader of his fellows were not only trans- 
mitted to him in germ as a father's legacy, they were 
conserved, developed, strengthened, dominated by the 
potent personality of Lyman Beecher." 

These were the four early forces, spiritual, dis- 
ciplinary, practical, intellectual, that determined the 
later life and work of Mr. Beecher. 

And if we are to reckon the life forces, we must not 
forget the influence of nature. Beecher was a child 
of nature. There was always something about him 
that suggested the largeness and freedom and fertility 
of nature. Litchfield County, Connecticut, is one of 
the most beautiful and picturesque parts of New Eng- 
land, and in what Wordsworth calls a *' wise passive- 
ness " the boy received the impress and lessons of nat- 
ural objects. His sister speaks of his '* peculiar pas- 
sion for natural scenery." Like Horace Bushnell, an- 
other Litchfield boy, he knew every stream and forest, 
every tree and flower and wood-note, And in the idle^ 



HENRY WARD BEECHER 1 13 

hours of boyhood, when books were a dull world, the 
mind was growing silently in its perceptions of beauty, 
and storing that treasure of delightful memory and 
appreciative observation that was to be both the com- 
fort and inspiration of his manhood. Nature colors 
his thought and lives in his speech. His sermons get 
much of their vividness from the fields, as the words 
of Christ did. And his letters and sketches such as 
the " Star Papers '' and ** Life Thoughts '' have the 
very breath of winds and the odor of fields and flow- 
ers. '' The chief use of a farm," he says, '' if it be 
well selected and of a proper soil, is to lie down upon. 
Mine is an excellent farm for such uses, and I thus 
cultivate it every day. Large crops are the conse- 
quence, of great delight, and fancies more than the 
brain can hold.'' And of an elm tree standing in his 
pasture, he writes : '* Does a man bare his head in 
some old church? So do I, standing in the shadow of 
this regal tree, and looking up into that completed 
glory at which three hundred years had been at work 
with noiseless fingers. What was I in its presence 
but a grasshopper ? (My heart said, ' I may not call 
thee property, and that property mine. Thou belong- 
est to the air. Thou art the child of summer. Thou 
art the mighty temple where birds praise God. Thou 
belongest to no man's hand, but to all men's eyes that 
do love beauty, and that have learned through beauty 
to behold God.' " 

Longfellow's beautiful tribute to Agassiz is just as 
true of Mr. Beecher: 

And nature, the old nurse, took 

The child upon her knee, 
Saying, " Here is a story-book 

Thy Father has written for thee/' 



114 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

" Come, wander with me/' she said, 
" Into regions yet untrod. 
And read what is still unread 
In the manuscripts of God." 

And he wandered away and away 
With Nature, the dear old Nurse, 

Who sang to him night and day 
The rhymes of the universe. 

And whenever the way seemed long. 

Or his heart began to fail, 
She would sing a more wonderful song, 

Or tell a more marvelous tale. 

The training of Mr. Beecher in the schools is soon 
told, but there are some very good things from it for 
preachers to remember. When Lyman Beecher moved 
to Boston, where he was pastor of Hanover Street 
Church, the fascinations of city life were too much 
at first for the country boy, and Henry Ward spent 
more time at the docks and among the ships than in 
the Boston Latin School. It was only the hunger of 
the boy's mind after the larger world, just as at Litch- 
field he passed through the stage coach period, when 
he knew every driver, and was allowed to handle the 
four-in-hand and thought that the only way to know 
the world was to be a stage-driver. Though out of 
love and obedience to his father he mastered the Latin 
Grammar, knowing it from cover to cover, it fell out 
by a good chance that his father learned of his ambi- 
tion to be a sailor, not of course a common sailor, but 
a midshipman and sometime an admiral. So his fa- 
ther shrewdly persuaded him that the only hope of 
realizing such an ambition was to become proficient in 



HENRY WARD BEECHER 1 15 

mathematics, and so sent him to a good preparatory- 
school at Amherst, saying quietly to himself, '* We 
shall yet make a minister of Henry Ward." The in- 
fluence of a revival of religion and the nearness to 
Amherst college soon drove thoughts of the sea from 
his mind and he entered Amherst and after the due 
college course, Lane Theological Seminary, where 
his father was then President and Professor of Theol- 
ogy. The two striking facts of his preparatory work 
was his study of elocution and of mathematics. No 
one would have predicted a speaker of the boy, bash- 
ful and with thick and indistinct utterance. '* When 
Henry is sent to me with a message,'' said a good aunt, 
*' I always have to make him say it three times. The 
first time I have no manner of an idea more than if he 
spoke Choctaiw; the second, I catch now and then a 
word ; by the third time, I begin to understand." 

Mr. Beecher always cherished a grateful memory 
of Mr. Lowell, his teacher of elocution. ** A better 
teacher in his department never was made." His voice 
was developed by most persevering, systematic train- 
ing. ** His gestures and the management of his body 
went through a drill corresponding to that which the 
military youth goes through at West Point, to make 
his body supple to the exigencies of military evolu- 
tion." He never could have attained his success with- 
out this training, and though he developed a voice of 
unusual purity and compass, with the range from a 
bird note to a thunderstorm, expressive of every shade 
of thought and feeling, and his face like an actor's; 
not a mask, but as expressive as the voice; to the last 
of his life, by daily exercise in elocution he kept the 
voice the perfect, facile instrument of speech. 

His training in mathematics was no less vigorous 



Il6 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

and successful. He did not like mathematics but to 
gratify his teacher, a West Point graduate for whom 
he formed a romantic friendship, and to become a 
great admiral like Nelson, he gave himself to this dis- 
agreeable task. '' Thanks to his friend and teacher 
Fitzgerald, his mathematical training had given him 
the entire mastery of La Croix's Algebra, so that he 
was prepared to demonstrate at random any proposi- 
tion as chance selected — not only without aid or 
prompting from the teacher, but controversially as 
against the teacher, who would sometimes publicly 
attack the pupil's method of demonstration, disputing 
him step by step, when the scholar was expected to 
know with such positive clearness as to put down and 
overthrow the teacher. ' You must not only know, 
but you must know that you know,' was Fitzgerald's 
maxim; and Mr. Beecher attributed much of his sub- 
sequent habit of steady antagonistic defense of his 
own opinions to this early mathematical training." 
By his Latin and mathematics he knew how to study; 
he had gained the power of concentrated attention, 
and this he devoted to his own plan of culture. The 
classics did not attract him, but oratory and rhetoric 
were his weapons he felt to reach the men of to-day. 
So he devoted himself to English classical study. Mil- 
ton's prose and poetry. Bacon, Shakspeare, and the 
writers of the Elizabethan period were his classics and 
these he read again and again. He was the first hu- 
morist of his college time, but all the marks on the 
well worn volunies of English poetry show his love 
of the earnest, the heroic, the pathetic. 

In his sophomore year as mere frolic, he began a 
course of investigation that colored his whole life. A 
lecture on phrenology as a college joke led to a club 



HENRY WARD BEECHER 1 17 

for physiological research. And he began his read- 
ing of anatomy and physiology, carrying them along 
carefully with his studies in mental philosophy. And 
from that day he continued to read all the physiolog- 
ical writers of the English language, forming a phys- 
ico-psychology when such a position was far in ad- 
vance of others, and on this basing through life his 
system of thought. The man who as a student read 
Gall and Spurtzheim naturally in later years mastered 
the works of Herbert Spencer and tried to interpret 
the truths of Christianity in the terms of evolutionary 
philosophy. 

The early religious history of Mr. Beecher was what 
might be expected from his peculiar endowment and 
training. A child with great depth of feeling, with 
yearning after the beautiful and heroic, with a sensi- 
tive conscience had always the capacity of easy and 
quick faith and devotion, but he waited in accordance 
with the religious formulas of the time for a period 
of deep conviction and for special experience of God's 
grace. And so boyhood passed and Henry Ward 
Beecher was a youth of seventeen before he cherished 
even a trembling hope of a Christian. It was the re- 
suit of a revival season in his preparatory school and 
with more fear than joy he joined himself with God's 
people. During another revival season in his college 
life he tried to test his love by some of the profound 
tests of Edwards and was left in blank despair. After 
days of almost hopeless prayer his mind was filled 
with a sense of divine love which seemed to him Hke 
a revelation. 

The Seminary course was a critical time for Mr 
Beecher, '* a time of intellectual broadening, earnest 
spiritual activity, and deep soul unrest." For two 



Il8 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

years he was filled with doubts and then came a vi- 
sion of God as shining as that which blinded Saul on 
the Damascus road or filled the soul of Charles G. 
Finney in his lawyer's offiice. His preaching for fifty 
years received its direction and tone from that hour. 
'* It then pleased God to lift upon me such a view of 
Christ, as one whose nature and office it is to have 
infinite and exquisite pity upon the weakness and want 
of sinners, as I had never had before. I saw that he 
had compassion upon them because they were sinners, 
and because he wanted to help them out of their sins. 
It came to me like the bursting forth of spring. It 
was as if yesterday there was not a bird to be 
seen or heard and as if to-day the woods were full of 
singing birds. There rose up before me a view of 
Jesus, as the Saviour of sinners, not of saints, but of 
sinners unconverted before they were any better be- 
cause they were so bad and needed so much; and 
that view has never gone from me. It did not at 
first fill the whole heaven ; it came as a rift along the 
horizon, gradually, little by little, the cloud rolled up. 
It was three years before the whole sky was cleared 
so that I could see all around, but from that hour I 
felt that God had a Father's heart; that Christ loved 
me in my sin; that while I was a sinner, He did not 
frown upon me nor cast me off, but cared for me 
with unutterable tenderness, and would help me out 
of sin; and it seemed to me that I had everything 
needed. When that vision was vouchsafed to me, I 
felt that there was no more for me to do but to love, 
trust, and adore ; nor has there ever been in my mind 
a doubt since that I did love, trust and adore. There 
has been an imperfect comprehension, there have been 
grievous sins, there have been long defections; but 



HENRY WARD BEECHER 1 19 

never for a single moment have I doubted the power 
of Christ's love to save me, any more than I have 
doubted the existence in the heavens of the sun by day 
and the moon by night." There can be no doubt that 
this vision of Christ was God's guiding him for a 
great mission. He could not preach any other man's 
theology. No man ever had a stronger passion for 
souls. ** I will preach," he says in the midst of these 
times of doubt, ** if it is in the byways and hedges." 
'* I must preach the Gospel as it is revealed to me." 
And now he had the message of personal experience, 
my Gospel, as surely as Paul. *' To present Jesus 
Christ personally as the Friend and Helper of hu- 
manity, Christ as God impersonate, eternally and by 
the necessity of his nature, helpful and remedial and 
restorative, the friend of each individual soul, and thus 
the friend of all society : this was the one thing which 
his soul rested on as a worthy object in entering the 
ministry." He says of his feelings : '* I was like the 
man in the story to whom a fairy gave a purse with a 
single piece of money in it, which he found always 
came again as soon as he had spent it. I thought I 
knew at last one thing to preach. I found it included 
everything." 

2 

His Career in the Ministry 

At the close of his seminary course, Mr. Beecher 
accepted the first call that came, to Lawrenceburg, 
Indiana, a rough frontier town on the Ohio River, 
with fifteen hundred people and four distilleries. The 
Presbyterian Church to which he was called had 
twenty members, nineteen women and one good for 



I20 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

nothing man, and the salary promised was two hun- 
dred and fifty dollars a year. Here he brought his 
young wife, a gifted and cultivated daughter of Massa- 
chusetts, and made their first home. They struggled 
with poverty together and love grew purer and their 
joys sweeter. He gave himself to his people as though 
there were no other church in the world. '' He did 
all the work of the parish sexton, making his fires, 
trimming his lamps, sweeping his house. He did not 
ring the bell simply because they had none. ' I did 
all,' he said whimsically, ' but come to hear myself 
preach — that they had to do.' " A deep impression 
was made by the new man and his living message. 
He was the friend of all. He sought out the neg- 
lected and had a special word for the doubter. He 
had no false humility and was willing to wear old 
clothing which kind friends gave him. He was cath- 
olic in his spirit, holding fast to the personal Christ 
and so preaching a comprehensive Gospel, building up 
the Kingdom and not advancing the interests of a 
party. In the bitter and unjustifiable attack upon his 
father for heresy, in the jealousies and bickerings of 
schools within the Church, in the enmities of sects 
that should work for a common faith, he gained a 
large vision for his own life which sometimes disre- 
garded the necessity for forms of truth and worship 
for other souls. He saw that a part of the unbelief 
about him was due to the unwise zeal of Christians 
in defending mere ecclesiastical trifles, and he deter- 
mined to speak only what seemed the essential, uni- 
versal principles of Christianity. *' I remember rid- 
ing through the woods for long, dreary days, and I 
recollect at one time coming out into an open place 
where the sun shone down through the bank of the 



HENRY WARD BEECHER 121 

river, and where I had such a sense of the love of 
Christ, of the nature of His work on earth, of its 
beauty and grandeur, and such a sense of the miser- 
ableness of Christian men quarreHng and seeking to 
build up antagonistic churches — in other words, the 
Kingdom of Christ rose up before my mind with such 
supreme loveliness and majesty — that I sat in my 
saddle I do not know how long (many, many min- 
utes, perhaps half an hour), and there, all alone, in 
a great forest of Indiana, probably twenty miles from 
any house, I prayed for that Kingdom, saying audibly, 
' I will never be a sectary.' " 

After three years at Lawrenceburg, Mr. Beecher 
went to the Second Church of Indianapolis. He did 
not wish to go. He had no ambition for a larger field. 
He mistrusted his own powers. Twice he declined 
the call, and only went when the Synod of Indiana as 
a body urged the step. Indianapolis was then only 
a struggling town of four thousand people, full of 
restless ambition, and partisanship, the seat of gam- 
l)ling, intemperance, and worse vices, with little of 
the promise of the noble city of to-day. 

Mr. Beecher's powers had a slow development : they 
took time to ripen. Spiritual success came with hard, 
patient lessons. " For the first three years I did not 
make a single sinner wink." '' I went to bed every 
Sunday night with the vow that I would buy a farm 
and quit the ministry." 

But he was a man of immense industry and fidel- 
ity. He used the best ministers' helps. He made a 
constant general study of the New Testament, espe- 
cially the Gospels, so that Christ became as real as 
himself. He kept up the Shakspearean dramatists, 
the great essayists: read widely in modern poetry. 



122 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

He made the Puritan Preachers his daily companions. 
He knew Jeremy Taylor, and South and Barrow. 
After finishing his first lecture to young men, he took 
down a volume of Barrow and after awhile with a 
vigorous motion of disgust, he threw his own manu- 
script under the bookcase where it lay for several 
days. But he had the good sense to take it up and 
work it over, and it was the first of the '* Lectures to 
Young Men," that had a national influence, and was 
the beginning of his national fame. I have read from 
the Yale lectures the story of how he preached what 
he calls his first sermon. He wanted the souls of 
men, not a multitude of hearers or the fame of an 
orator. And so he went to the New Testament and 
made a study of the early addresses and found that 
the speaker began with the knowledge and conviction 
of his hearers and on this led them to truth and 
made his appeal for action. And Mr. Beecher fol- 
lowed the same method — the natural method of ap- 
proach — and nineteen men fell before the truth of 
that sermon. And ever since this has been his method. 
He emphasizes what Dr. Watson has called the hu- 
manness of the sermon. He does not speculate but 
describes what is going on in the souls of men and 
gives what he holds to be God's message for present 
need. Revival after revival followed his preaching. 
His church grew from a little handful of believers to 
a host of earnest, effective workers. He went over 
the state helping other pastors in revival seasons. His 
interest in practical life, temperance, and social wel- 
fare, and the cause of the slave, was strong from the 
first, and he preached the truth fearlessly but always 
with such Scriptural argument and illustration and 
the truth in love that he rarely made enemies. 



HENRY WARD BEECHER 1 23 

His western training made him a national preacher. 
It is a reasonable supposition that except for the ten 
years in these small western churches (farther away 
than Idaho to-day) Mr. Beecher would never have 
gained that minute knowledge of men, that genuine 
sympathy with all classes and conditions, that mas- 
tery of his own powers of thought and expression 
that made him the Master of Assemblies. 

In 1847 he went to Plymouth Church, Brooklyn. 
He was its first pastor and under God made Plymouth 
Church. He had no ambition for such a place, and 
it was a doubtful experiment at first. This young 
man, whose style had something of the luxuriance of 
the western prairie and his freedom and originality 
of dealing with truth like the strong beating of a 
prairie wind, attracted multitudes at first. A critical 
neighboring minister gave the young prodigy six 
months to preach out. He kept the same pulpit for 
forty years and poured out like some great spring 
among the hills his fresh and life-giving thoughts. 

At the examining council, he made a poor figure in 
technical theology but he revealed the shrewd wit and 
deep love that have been the twin-elements of his power 
and influence. " I am glad to find one candidate who 
knows the Lord Jesus Christ and His Gospel," said 
Horace Bushnell. 

I cannot trace step by step his work as the Plymouth 
preacher. To his work as a reformer I shall refer in 
another lecture. God knows the times and He has 
his men. He came to the Kingdom at the right time. 
And I suppose his clearest and purest work is in his 
teachings of practical righteousness, the work with 
the least earthly dross in it. His supreme aim is the 
building up of manhood. And to this end he made 



124 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

men feel that God loved them and could help them. 
He was a hope-bringer to toiling, burdened, oppressed, 
baffled and sinning humanity. And his teaching had 
the best example in the man. He loved men with an 
absorbing and impelling love. He bore their bur- 
dens, fulfilling Christ's law, even bearing in his body 
the marks of the Lord Jesus. '' He was the chief 
champion in America of the pulpit's duty to apply 
Christianity to all the great ethical concerns of busi- 
ness and society." He did in the pulpit what his sis- 
ter did through fiction. Of course he roused intense 
hatred and many times was a sword blade rather than 
a balm; but it is hard to imagine the stern truths of 
righteousness put in more persuasive forms. The 
Thanksgiving sermon of i860 against Compromise of 
Principle is a good example of his truth-loving, fear- 
less message, and the vividness and force and sweep 
of his style. 

^' Vainglory will destroy us. Pride will wreck us. 
Above all, the fear of doing right will be fatal. But 
justice and liberty are pilots that do not lose their 
craft. They steer by a divine compass. They know 
the hand that holds the winds and the storms. It is 
always safe to be right; and our business is not so 
much to seek peace, as to seek the causes of peace." 

*' The rush of life, the vigor of earnest men, the 
conflict of realities, invigorate, cleanse, and establish 
truth. Our only fear should be lest we refuse God's 
work. He has appointed this people, and our day, 
for one of those world-battles on which ages turn. 
Ours is a pivotal period. The strife is between a dead 
past and a living future; between a wasting evil and 
a nourishing good; between barbarism and civiliza- 
tion." 



HENRY WARD BEECHER 125 

His speeches in Great Britain in 1863, at Manches- 
ter, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Liverpool, and London, were 
the supreme effort of his life, for which all previous 
study and training were the divine fitting, and he 
turned the tide of public opinion in favor of the North 
and kept the Conservative ministry from recognizing 
the Southern Confederacy. 

All these years his thought was maturing and his 
power growing as a preacher. You could find the 
way from Fulton Ferry to Plymouth Church any Sun- 
day morning by following the crowd. His sermons 
were printed in half a dozen great weeklies. His pen 
was as productive as his voice. He was successively 
editor of the Independent and the Christian Union. 
He wrote a novel, *' Norwood," of no structural value 
but rich in glimpses of noble thought and the very 
idyl of New England village life. He began a life of 
Christ, not critical or doctrinal, but it might be called, 
as Mrs. Ward has done for hers, '* The Story of Jesus 
Christ." 

And then his sun was darkened at noon-day. The 
years ^y2-y6 are black and foul with the Beecher 
scandal. I cannot go into it. All the human fiends, 
all the vile of thought and life believed it, gloated over 
it and tried to make it true. Many good people who 
had been offended at his keen thrusts at their cher- 
ished opinions and who held that he was an under- 
miner of faith, secretly believed in his guilt. 

It is enough to say that his wife knew him to be 
pure, that his church after long and thorough investi- 
gation fully exonerated him, that a civil jury failed to 
convict, that even the opposing counsel — eminent law- 
yers — afterwards confessed that they believed him 
innocent, that a Congregationalist council of 200, from 



126 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

all parts of the country, acquitted him without a dis- 
senting vote. 

No doubt the trial did incalculable evil in corrupt- 
ing the public mind, and bringing suspicion upon a 
leader of faith. No man felt it so keenly as Mr. 
Beecher himself ; and in his desire to save the reproach 
of the Church (and so the effort for four years to 
make a false peace) and in his morbid self-condemna- 
tion lest he in some way had given occasion for of- 
fense, were found the sole materials of prosecution. 
Through it all Mr. Beecher was held by an unfalter- 
ing trust, the most abiding sense of Christ's presence 
and love, and his prayers and his sermons were in an 
atmosphere of loftier spirituality. 

It cannot be said that his fame ever became per- 
fectly clear again; but who can doubt that his final 
force on the Kingdom of Christ will be more efficient 
for his bearing in this deepest sense the reproaches 
of Christ? 

The thought of his last years, under the influence of 
his philosophical studies took the form of the restate- 
ment of Christianity in something of scientific terms, 
that he might adjust Christian faith to its new en- 
vironment. Many feel that it was his least happy 
work. They miss the old-time fervor. They would 
that the words of Christ's love were oftener on his 
lips. It is certain that Mr. Beecher never lost his own 
faith, ** How can that ever be finished?" he said of 
the life of Christ. The hymn that he chose for his 
own burial was : ** When I survey the wondrous 
Cross." And a well known minister of his own 
church who knew him as a brother and often dis- 
sented from his views, calls him *' as true a Christian 



HENRY WARD BEECHER 127 

as lives, as pure a soul as thinks, as simple and trust- 
ful a spirit as God has in the world." The test of his 
teachings will be its fruit in life. If he is among the 
prophets, the seed will take time to ripen. 



The Characteristics of His Preaching 

I can only say a word on the special homiletic 
lessons of Mr. Beecher's work. I have preferred to 
let the life tell its own story. 

His preparation was general rather than special. 
He enriched himself, his own thought, rather that got 
ready for any special service. The accumulation was 
always going on, even when he was the most idle. 
He was a hard student in many lines of thought, rely- 
ing on specialists in different departments. He had 
the habit of filling the interstices of time, for example 
(and a bad example too) he read Froude's *' History 
of England " between dinner courses. 

He studied men more intently than books. He went 
everywhere with his eyes open and his heart open, 
and so he got sermons from shops and stores, from 
streets and ferry boats. 

He never spoke on any subject without long study, 
often years. His note-book was always full of texts 
and plans and illustrations and the letters in his pocket 
were covered with suggestions. During the week two 
or three topics would be uppermost in his mind. On 
these he would brood, and Sunday morning prepare 
a brief outline. Many of his early sermons were 
fully written, but the notes grew fewer and fewer 
until only an outline was suggested. His creative 



128 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

impulses came periodically and by long habit he was 
able to time them so that they served the highest work 
of the pulpit. 

The personality of Mr. Beecher gave the charm and 
power to his pulpit. In few men were the person and 
the message so vitally fused, and we can feebly gather 
the sources of his power by a critical reading of his 
sermons. Yet the sermons are marked by the reality 
of the man — and the man is in them. 

They are marked by intellectual insight, creative 
imagination and humanity of feeling. His intellec- 
tual life is marked by a sensibility that feels truth, 
an intuition that flashes its way to the highest truths 
of doctrine and life. He holds that the truths of the 
spiritual life are not discoverable by mere logical 
faculties, but by special intuitions and that the Holy 
Spirit touches man through these special intuitions. 
Here is the strength and weakness of his work. 

His imagination was both creative and pictorial. 
His intuitions took form and color and substance be- 
fore his mind. He grasped truth as a concrete thing. 
And in telling others what he saw and felt, the im- 
agination furnished him the greatest wealth of strong 
pictorial speech. Every field and experience brought 
its symbol or picture of truth. This was especially 
true in depicting human Hfe. '' That knowledge of 
anatomy, character and color which a great painter 
like Da Vinci evinces in drawing the human face, 
Mr. Beecher applied after his order in depicting the 
inner life of man." 

Then he has unfailing humanity. A great heart 
pulses in all that he says. And you feel that in spite 
of many eccentricities the heart is constrained by the 
love of Christ. ** When the eccentricity seems great- 



HENRY WARD BEECHER 129 

est/' says Dr. Leonard Bacon, *' the centrifugal force 
is checked and the star is held in its orbit by the 
attraction of the' sun of righteousness." *' The fac- 
ulty of seeing things to love in individuals and of tak- 
ing them into his personal regard is the tap-root of 
his influence. He sways the masses and wins their 
heart just because to him there are no masses." 

The statue of Mr. Beecher in Brooklyn beautifully 
tells the story of his life. 

** On a pedestal of dark Quincy granite rises the 
statue of Mr. Beecher, of heroic size, and represent- 
ing him as a man of great courage and sympathy. 
Mr. Beecher stands with overcoat on, and his soft 
felt hat in hand, as if he had stopped for a moment 
in a walk, or was about to address an outdoor assem- 
bly. On the pedestal is the figure of a negro girl 
raising a branch of palm to show the gratitude of 
her people. There are also two other graceful figures 
representing two white children, a boy seated and en- 
deavoring to support the figure of a girl, who is try- 
ing to push a garland up to the plinth." ^ 

The last night Mr. Beecher preached in Plymouth 
Church, he sat in the pulpit after the congregation had 
withdrawn, his head sunk between his shoulders after 
the typical picture of Napoleon, listening to Mr. John 
Zundel, the organist, who had the power of dispelling 
the spirits of weariness and depression. Two small 
newsboys stole in, attracted by the music and the 
light. Mr. Beecher, finally noticing them, went down 
into the aisle and gathering a boy under each arm 
went forth with tender and sympathetic interest. He 
had the greatness of the child-like spirit. 

1 " Life of Beecher," by Barrows, p. 514. 



VII 

PHILLIPS BROOKS : THE MAN AND THE PREACHER 

** A great life is the simplest thing in the world, 
God's gift direct from His own heart and hand, in- 
stinct with His power. You may tell its story, you 
may study its methods and motives, you may catch 
its inspiration, but you cannot analyze it or imitate 
it, or fill its place, or do its work/* 

These words that close the beautiful tribute of Ar- 
thur Brooks to his greater brother, Phillips Brooks, 
can hardly fail to voice the exact feeling of any man 
who tries to measure the " foremost-hearted of his 
time," and to give something of the large *' utterance 
of his living breath/' 

Phillips Brooks was blessed in his birth and train- 
ing. Generations of plain living and high thinking, 
of simple piety and generous humanity lived in his 
life. Like Emerson, he had back of him a long line 
of Puritan ministers. He was a child of the proph- 
ets and of the covenant. He was the eighth genera- 
tion from John Cotton, the father of the New Eng- 
land theology. His great-grandfather was Lieutenant- 
Governor Phillips, one of the founders of Phillips 
Academy, Andover; and his grandmother, the wife of 
Samuel Phillips, a rarely beautiful woman and a gifted 
writer of letters, was the chief donor to Andover 
Theological Seminary. Wendell Phillips was his uncle. 
It is no wonder that the child of such an ancestry should 

130 



PHILLIPS BROOKS 131 

be dowered with the love of truth, and an expressive 
souL 

Born in 1835 in Boston, he prepared for college 
in the Boston Latin School and entered Harvard at 
sixteen. I need hardly say that the lad had the most 
careful and thorough training. His home was the 
center of large intellectual interests, of broad outlook 
upon men and events, made possible by the scorn of 
frivolities or foolish conventionalities and a rigorous 
self-denial that subordinated all ambitions and pleas- 
ures to mental and social well-being. It was the train- 
ing of a man. 

And he entered Harvard at a time when the college 
life was devout yet inquiring, a quickener of thought 
and religion. Felton was still in the chair of Greek, 
Agassiz was giving to nature a new charm, and Long- 
fellow and Lowell were in their manly vigor. And 
beyond college walls were other noble messages for 
open hearts. Emerson was calling men to look deeper 
into the heart of things and Tennyson's '' In Me- 
moriam," just published, was the age spirit in the deep- 
est matters of religion. 

Phillips Brooks felt and used the influences of this 
larger life that was dawning, yet without scorning the 
heritage of the past. A master of books, he was still 
more a master of hearts; and he left Harvard at 
twenty with honors enough for any youth, and best 
of all a simple and noble nature, ready for any call 
of the highest use. 

The call to the life work soon came; and after a 
short experience as teacher in the Boston Latin School 
we find him at Alexandria, Virginia, a theological 
school of the Evangelical or Low Church party. We 
know in his Lectures on Preaching the emphasis he 



132 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

put here on study as the condition of true spiritual 
power. His friends of these days speak of his grasp 
of truth and rare spiritual insight; but he himself 
refers to the time as one of hazy views and faltering 
speech. When called upon to speak to his fellow 
students, he shrank from voicing an experience upon 
which he had barely entered, and modestly took for 
his subject " Some thoughts on Poetry." 

His college friends could not understand his choice 
of a profession that to them seemed bare and nar- 
row and uneventful. He chose it blindly in part, as 
the only sphere where a life so large as his could find 
its freedom and its joy. And in this choice God was 
working to use the largest life of the generation to 
clarify and unify the forces of faith. I quote again 
from the words of his brother : " Descended through 
a long line of Congregational ministers, with Puritan 
blood and traditions constituting the very essence of 
his heritage, he was born at a time when the stern 
dogmatic faith had received a staggering blow in the 
development of Unitarianism in its central citadel. 
Devout souls, which had been brought up with the 
thought of the supremacy of Christ, felt themselves 
under the influence of the new Unitarian teaching, 
thrown back upon the internal evidence of their per- 
sonal love to Him. Holding still, in a greater or less 
degree, and with more or less precision to old state- 
ments, they counted the great fact which these state- 
ments enshrined more precious and evident than ever. 
And in that atmosphere of personal devotion to a 
loving Saviour and of dependence upon Him, Phillips 
Brooks lived and grew as a child. That love to 
Christ which glowed in his words and flashed in his 
eye was caught from a mother's lips, and was read 



PHILLIPS BROOKS 1 33 

with boyish eyes as the central power of a mother's 
soul and life. I may not say more, nor lift any fur- 
ther the veil which separates a holy of holies, into 
which we loved to enter with an awe which we could 
not understand. No revolt from influences under 
which he had been trained, no memory of controver- 
sial theology, could have been the power of that sweet 
and easy belief in Christ as the personal Saviour, any 
more than the fires of Vesuvius can be turned to warm 
the domestic hearth. But the positive love for Christ 
in the midst of a community where the right of con- 
trary and conflicting statements was fully allowed 
and abundantly used, accounts for the clear and warm 
statements of the Christian faith by which the world 
has been made the better." 

His first charge was the Church of the Advent 
in Philadelphia, from whence he went to the rector- 
ship of Holy Trinity in the same city, the year the 
Civil War began. And here a phase of his ministry 
appeared, in its spirit true of the man always, and 
yet never again brought out in such prominence by 
current events. He was in an atmosphere of timid 
and compromising conservatism, of secret sympathy 
with slavery as an aristocratic institution, fearful and 
watchful lest the pulpit should be defiled by the spirit 
of party. A braver soul than this young rector never 
stood in an American pulpit. He threw the whole 
force of his ardent youth, of his sublime faith, on the 
side of liberty and nationality. His pulpit fairly 
flamed with the scorn of selfish indifiference, and with 
the challenge to Christian citizenship. The State was 
not a social compact but a divine organism and they 
who were threatening it were laying hands upon the 
very ark of God. *' His life was one constant oppo- 



134 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

sition to all that tended to obscure the ideal of the 
nation's existence." And this breadth of interest was 
carried throughout his ministry. 

It has been said, perhaps with some truth, that 
Phillips Brooks was an individualist and had little 
sense in his ministry of society as a whole. He did 
believe that the divine life in the souls of men would 
work out a new order of life and so he has no formal 
word to society as a unit; but whatever concerned 
society, education, freedom, philanthropy, stirred his 
heart and won his quick allegiance. 

In 1869, he became the rector of Trinity Church, 
Boston, and for twenty-one years labored there with 
increasing power and joy. 

The church itself in its strength and beauty be- 
came a fitting symbol of the man. It was not lacking 
in organization, but the life was more than the form. 
It was not lacking in loyalty to its denomination, but 
devotion to the spiritual ideal of the church largely 
consumed the dross of party and sect. It became in 
a very true sense the Cathedral Church of Boston. 
Diversities of faith and life found there their unity and 
their inspiration in visions of their common Lord. 
The higher life of the city received its interpretation 
and its strongest impulse in the strength and compre- 
hensiveness of the Gospel there preached. Weary, 
baffled, beaten souls looked there for their hope. Men 
in the press of business, under the burden of civil and 
financial responsibilities found their strength to be true 
and patient and brave. Natures in the stress and 
strain of subtle speculations, tormented by problems 
that refused to be stated in easy and conventional 
forms of faith, found the simplicity of a life into 
which God really entered. 



PHILLIPS BROOKS 135 

It was all because a great soul stood in the Trinity 
pulpit and spoke with men as they really were and 
brought God to them, or rather made them feel that 
God was with them. It was no new message, but the 
eternal truth brought through a great personality and 
in a way that searched the consciousness of the gen- 
eration to its lowest depth. 

Men were not slow to perceive that a prophet had 
once more arisen. Let a man speak, who bears wit- 
ness of what he has seen and heard, who has a living 
message, and not the scribes' dull repetition of yes- 
terdays, and the people are bound to hear. The im- 
prisoned King will answer to the voice of the min- 
strel. 

As early as 1876 his first volume of sermons was 
published and widely read on both sides the sea. 
Even then men called him the Robertson of the Amer- 
ican pulpit. He contradicts his own statement that a 
sermon that is good to hear is not good to read. Vol- 
umes of his sermons are almost as common as great 
works of fiction, and his face looks its benediction 
from walls wherever the speech of Chaucer and 
Shakespeare, of Milton and Wordsworth is loved. In 
1877, he gave his ''Lectures on Preaching" at Yale 
Seminary, laying bare as far as one man can to 
others the secret of his power. There is no better 
book to store in the mind and lay on the heart, and I 
might say, go to God with. It can make no man a 
preacher, but any man who reads it and does not 
** catch something of the divine sunlight which flooded 
every corner of his being," is hardly fit to preach. 

He frequently visited England and the Continent 
during his vacations. He loved the storied places and 
the rich memorials of life : they appealed to his imagi- 



136 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

nation and deepened his sense of oneness with his 
fellows. He frequently preached in the EngHsh 
churches, in Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's, in 
the Temple and Christ Church, was honored by both 
Oxford and Cambridge, and was reverenced and loved 
there as at home. 

The work of a great church was only a part of his 
care. His voice and pen were at the service of men 
and he gave himself without stint. Dedication ser- 
mons and anniversary addresses and words to college 
men were a yearly thing. In all his outside work, he 
loved nothing better than his service to his own Alma 
Mater, as resident preacher. The first public service 
that stirred the multitude and attracted wide attention 
was his prayer at the dedication of the Memorial Hall 
at Harvard in '69, when Lowell gave his Commemora- 
tion Ode, the high water mark of American poetry. 
And his sermons in the college Chapel and his fa- 
miliar conversations with men in his own rooms on 
the difficulties and hopes of life and the divine fitness 
of the Gospel gave him a sweet joy and a sense of 
service to his generation that came from nothing else 
in life. 

He was above everything else a minister to young 
manhood. He commanded their admiration, inter- 
preted their life, set before them the noblest ideals and 
helped to turn the tide of spiritual life at Harvard. 
He made it hard for young men to doubt the essen- 
tial truth of Christianity, and their own divine ca- 
pacity. 

During one term of his residence, a certain fast set 
had spent the night in dissipation. The morning light 
revealed hollow eyes and wan faces, and men who did 
not care to look into their own hearts. There was a 



PHILLIPS BROOKS 1 37 

knock at the door and the beaming face of Phillips 
Brooks entered. He saw the situation at a glance but 
no word of censure fell from his lips. With the won- 
derful fascination of his speech, he poured out the 
natural interest of his heart for the College, for their 
lives, for young men. And then as he left, he said 
with his great searching eyes and hearty tones: 
'' Well, boys, it doesn't pay, does it ? " And in that 
presence their sin turned black before their eyes, they 
felt it to be unworthy of their manhood. 

He was open to every life. Mothers whose sons 
were leaving home for the city wrote him concerning 
the temptations of their boys and asking his interest. 
Young men in college, whose natures had been stirred 
by his message, poured out their hearts to him. One 
of our best known graduates, then a senior in college, 
was recalled to his purpose of the ministry by the read- 
ing of a sermon and the correspondence that followed 
it. Ministers and leaders from many churches and 
lands asked questions of him, who seemed to know 
their life so well, and yet to live on a height where 
many of its perplexities were made clear. And to 
this ever increasing number of souls he ministered 
with unwearied service. Postal cards he never used, 
and every writer received a carefully written answer 
in Mr. Brooks' own hand. 

A friend who happened to enter his study one day, 
tells of the great heap of letters which lay open be- 
fore the great preacher. *' Among all these letters," 
he said to the friend, *' which I have answered or shall 
answer, not one appertains to my parish. All are 
from persons outside the bounds of Trinity, and most 
of them from persons outside the bounds of Boston." 
And his doors were open to any who needed his help. 



138 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

He belonged to the people. Blood, culture, station, 
wealth, all the influences that make smaller men aris- 
tocrats, only broadened his sympathies. He was a 
man of the people, because he knew and believed in 
the essential worth of man. He was never greater 
than when he ministered without a thought of conde- 
scension to some humble toiler, or sent some poor 
mother out for an hour of rest or recreation in the 
parks while he cared for the baby. '* The common 
people loved him, and claimed him with a frank and 
pathetic confidence." A cab-man exclaimed to a friend 
on the street, the day of his death, '' Our dear Bishop 
is dead." A messenger boy said, '* Isn't it too bad 
that good priest is dead ? " When asked by a gentle- 
man who it was, the boy simply answered, '* Why, Fa- 
ther Brooks, didn't you know?" On the streets, in 
the shops and homes, among stablemen and cab-driv- 
ers, everywhere, the tidings of Phillips Brooks' death 
awakened a genuine sorrow. On the day of the 
funeral a working man in rough working attire gazed 
a moment at the body, and turned aside, his face 
drenched with tears. A poor woman, ill-clad, pressed 
her way through the throng, laid a handful of roses on 
the coffin, and withdrew, weeping bitterly. 

I had almost forgotten to speak of Bishop Brooks. 
The simple narrative of his life with which I began 
has in spite of me gone deeper. It seems impossible 
to say anything about him without touching something 
of the life itself. To those outside the Episcopal pol- 
ity, his election to the office of Bishop in '91 seemed 
the confining, not the enlarging, of the man. He was 
our preacher, we did not wish him to be any church's 
Bishop. But he did not regard it so, and no doubt 
he knew best* 



PHILLIPS BROOKS 139 

He was so independent in manhood, so simple and 
real in manner and dress and ideal of the ministry, so 
catholic in his conception and treatment of the Church, 
recognizing the priesthood of all believers, the equal 
rights of every Christian ordination, that his election 
and ordination was bitterly opposed by all narrow 
Churchmen, and by many others who conscientiously 
held his teaching to be lacking in distinctness and con- 
sistency of Christian doctrine. He was called traitor 
and heretic. But in his simple faith and silence he 
was sublime. He could not seek a place. Like his 
fellow-townsman, Charles Sumner, he was too self- 
respecting to lift his hand or say a word for any place 
in the gift of man. Urged by his friends to speak out 
and relieve the minds of some honest people who did 
not understand his position, he invariably replied : ** I 
will never say a word in vindication or explanation of 
my opinions. I stand upon my record; and by that 
record I will stand or fall. I have said what I think 
and believe in my public utterances and in my printed 
discourses, and have nothing to retract or to qualify." 

It was the triumph of a simple and comprehensive 
faith, a prophecy of larger unity for the sadly divided 
American Church that such a man could be put into 
the highest place. It was the triumph of Christian 
manhood over party expediency. And he entered 
upon the office of Bishop and took hold of its many 
lines of care and influence with the same minute fidel- 
ity lifted into the power of great principle that char- 
acterized and made masterful the rector of Trinity 
Church. No doubt he had hearty dislike of mere 
ecclesiastical functions. The story is told (I can not 
vouch for its truth) that at the first Convocation of 
Bishops after his induction into office, Bishop Potter 



140 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

of New York (his life long friend) passing down the 
aisle to his place assigned according to seniority, felt 
a strong hand tugging at his gown and heard a famil- 
iar voice, *^ Henry, is it always as stupid as this ? " 

However, Phillips Brooks believed in his own Church 
and reverenced the office of Bishop as the highest 
sphere of spiritual influence and he tried to make it 
all this. He had interest in everything that concerned 
his diocese. He was the friend and brother of all his 
clergymen, his visits in the manses looked forward to 
with the keenest delight by young and old. He had 
a passionate love of children, the kinship with them of 
a child spirit, and his most beautiful letters are those 
in which his big boy's heart talks and frolics with his 
little favorites. The two years as Bishop of Massa- 
chusetts were happy years, as happy as they were 
laborious and self-denying. 

And then came the end, quietly and suddenly. No 
one seemed to think that disease could fasten upon this 
massive strength. But the life-forces had been con- 
sumed for men. And he ceased here. His own wish 
was answered, *' Then I hope something better will 
come." 

The higher life of the nation was moved by his 
death as it had not been since the assassination of Lin- 
coln. He made a nation mourners. Men felt person- 
ally bereaved. As some great mountain passes from 
sight men felt without a way-mark, without the lofty 
summit on which eternal sunshine rested. They 
caught some glimpse of the fullness of the life as the 
blessed presence took its flight. In the silence that 
God had made they felt the central message that they 
were sons and that the vices and low affinities of the 
world were unworthy of sonship. It was like a reli- 



PHILLIPS BROOKS 141 

gious revival. " And when the hour of his burial 
came, the leading business houses of Boston closed 
their doors, members of the Loyal Legion, of which 
Bishop Brooks was a member, stood sentinel over his 
remains, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was 
represented by its Governor, the Legislature of the 
State sent deputies to his funeral, the city was repre- 
sented by its officials. Harvard University by its Presi- 
dent, overseers, professors, the Episcopal Divinity 
School by its dean and teachers and scholars, the 
Diocese of Massachusetts by its clergy and number- 
less organizations, and when the great church was 
filled the multitudes crowded Copley Square for a serv- 
ice in the open air." And then the most significant 
and unprecedented fact, twenty churches of other de- 
nominations were open for funeral services at the 
same hour. It is not too much to say that Phillips 
Brooks was the best loved man of his time. Is it not 
because he realized in his own person so much of the 
Christ life? And shall we not thereby with hope and 
thankfulness measure the progress of mankind from 
that day — the world crucified its best life outside the 
city wall? 

In this simple outline of his career, the man has 
appeared. A more transparent career was never lived. 
** How wretched I should be," he said to his friend 
Bishop Clarke of Rhode Island, ** if I felt that I was 
carrying about with me any secret which I would not 
be wilHng that all the world should know." What 
was the real man? the elements of greatness and holy 
power ? I wish that in a few strokes I could make 
the man stand before you. 

He was the most notable preacher of the generation 
— yet a greater man. The man was back of the 



14^ THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

preacher. It was unconsciously a self-revelation. 

You remember his definition : '' Truth through per- 
sonality is our description of real preaching. Truth 
must come really through the person, not merely over 
his lips, not merely into his understanding and out 
through his pen. It must come through his character, 
his affections, his whole intellectual and moral being." 
** And the preparation for the ministry; it is nothing 
less than the making of a man." And the man — the 
ideal? He must be a man of personal piety, a deep 
possession in his own soul of the faith and hope and 
resolution which he is to offer to his fellow men for 
their new life. A man of mental and spiritual un- 
selfishness, who conceives of truth with reference to 
its communication, and receives any spiritual blessing 
as a trust for others. A man of hopefulness; a 
healthy body with the perfectly sound soul. And then 
the power by which the man loses himself, and be- 
comes but the sympathetic atmosphere between the 
truth on one side of him, and the man on the other 
side of him. And then he sums it up in the noble 
words : " Pray for and work for fullness of life above 
everything else ; full red blood in the body ; full honesty 
and truth in the mind; and the fullness of a grateful 
love for the Saviour in your heart." No man ap- 
proached nearer his ideal, and no man had more of 
the Pauline spirit, ** I count not myself to have appre- 
hended." 

He had a body that was the fit temple and type of 
the great soul. His presence was glorious. The 
strength and simple dignity and unfailing gentleness 
of his person commanded the respect of the strong 
and the love of the weak. He had essentially the 
mind and feelings of the poet. He knew the great 



PHILLIPS BROOKS 143 

poets and loved them and they ministered to him. He 
saw vividly and felt profoundly. This was the inter- 
pretative power of spiritual things. *' His sense of 
God was the most complete and constant I have ever 
known in any soul " — the testimony of a close friend. 
He was like Tennyson's poet: 

He saw through life and death, 
Through good and ill: 
He saw through his own soul. 
The marvel of the Eternal Will 
An open scroll before him lay. 

He was a passionate lover of nature, not a dissector 
of her dead forms, but a lover of her living forces. 
Nature had a soul to him, and spoke a message to his 
soul. '' He clothed his thoughts in the drapery of 
nature, finding his material in the ocean, with all its 
suggestions of majesty and might — in the sky with 
its ever shifting clouds and radiant sunsets — in the 
earth with its hills and valleys, and silver streams 
and nestling hamlets. Every sound in nature helped 
to give some musical tone to his thoughts; the thun- 
der and the storm, the sighing of the breeze, the sing- 
ing of the birds in spring-time, the rustle of the corn- 
field — all were to him God's symbols, God's language ; 
and he used them all to give Hfe and fullness to the 
mighty spiritual truths which he was called to pro- 
claim." 

He was a student of life and history, and knew the 
directive movements of thought and events. He was 
not lacking in logical faculty and could follow ab- 
struse and subtle processes with accuracy and pleas- 
ure. He had an organizing mind that loved order and 
made the details of thought and duty the servants 



144 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

of great designs. He was thinker, philosopher, poet, 
logician, orator, master of affairs. And yet he was 
none of these, or rather more than these. 

The supreme quality of his manhood — was the 
great heart. It was love that made him great. 
Christ's love for him — that purified the heart, en- 
nobled it and poured it forth in great tides of pity and 
sympathy for men. He stands out as the marked man 
of the American pulpit in his enthusiasm for human- 
ity. Love in him, as Paul declares, was the '' bond 
of perfectness." It was the crowning, supreme vir- 
tue, the force that controlled and harmonized all other 
faculties; that kept them from selfish and perverted 
use — made them servants of the soul, compelled them 
to add their forces to the single purpose and blessed- 
ness of helping men. A man with such a purpose, 
such a passion can never fail. 

And this was the man who always spoke in his 
sermons. It was Phillips Brooks and nobody else. 
Everything about him was personal and original yet 
harmonious. The impetuous speech was the outpour- 
ing of great thoughts driven by great emotions. The 
style, simple, pictorial, musical, was intensely individ- 
ual. He rarely quoted. You feel that Hfe is here 
in its breadth of interests, but the contributions of 
a thousand forms all well forth from the fountain of 
his own being. 

It is rich and full with the fullness of his own 
vision of truth and the richness of his own sympa- 
thies. 

His humanness — the fellowship with the deeper life 
of men, his profound sense of God in His world — 
the strength and flow of symbol and phrase are well 
seen in a single paragraph from ** The Sea of Glass 



PHILLIPS BROOKS 145 

mingled with fire." — 4: 113. The permanent value of 
trial. 

*' When a man conquers his adversaries and his diffi- 
culties, it is not as if he never had encountered them. 
Their power, still kept, is in all his future life. They 
are not only events in his past history, they are ele- 
ments in all his present character. His victory is 
colored with the hard struggle that won it. His sea 
of glass is always mingled with fire, just as this peace- 
ful crust of the earth on which we live, with its wheat 
fields and vineyards, and orchards, and flower beds, is 
full still of the power of the convulsion that wrought 
it into its present shape, of the floods and volcanoes 
and glaciers which have rent it, or drowned it, or tor- 
tured it. Just as the whole fruitful earth, deep in its 
heart, is still mingled with the ever-burning fire that 
is working out its chemical fitness for its work, just 
so the life that has been overturned by the strong hand 
of God, filled with the deep revolutionary forces of 
suffering, purified by the strong fires of temptation, 
keeps its long discipline forever, roots in that dis- 
cipline the deepest growths of the most sunny and 
luxuriant spiritual life that it is ever able to attain." 

I never had the privilege of hearing him speak. I 
must take the word of one who often sat as a listener : 

*' The rapid utterance, the toss of the head, the fre- 
quent looking up from the audience, the lack of ges- 
tures suited to the word are entirely forgotten in the 
communication of his thought to the people. Even 
the imposing physique is lost sight of. The very form 
of the sermon itself is forgotten. Silently, gradually, 
the speech, whether written or unwritten, becomes the 
contact of soul with soul, the wrestling of a master 
in the dealing with the whole of life, which goes on 



146 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

between the preacher and those before him. I have 
never met one who could define the oratory of Bishop 
Brooks. It is the flowing together of so many quali- 
ties which come out from the man himself in his 
speech that it cannot be defined, and yet its effect is 
due to mental and spiritual laws that are in happy 
combination. It is his favorite principle of person- 
ality which he once described as the only power in 
which mystery can become real and vital and prac- 
tical." 

Bishop Brooks has himself given us an outline of 
his message, an epitome of his doctrine. You will 
find it in the last lecture on Preaching, the Value of 
the Human Soul. 

** The conviction that truth and destiny are essen- 
tial and not arbitrary; that Christianity is the per- 
sonal love and service of Christ; and that salvation 
is positive, not negative." 

All through his preaching runs the idea of the es- 
sential nature of Gospel facts and doctrines : not so 
because God has decreed them; but decreed because 
they are in the very nature of things, God's nature 
and man's nature. Take the fact of Christ's atoning 
death as an example. I quote from a Good Friday 
sermon in the first volume. 

" ' My God ! My God ! Why hast Thou forsaken 
me?' he cries, making his own the words of an old 
Psalm of woe. When I read what men have written 
to explain the meaning of Jesus in that cry, I always 
feel anew how much deeper than our comprehension 
went his identification with humanity when He plunged 
into the darkness of its sin. 

** He was made flesh. Into what mysterious contact 
with the sinfulness to which the flesh of man had 



PHILLIPS BROOKS 147 

given itself that being made flesh brought him, I 
know no man has ever fathomed. If I try to fathom 
it all, I can only picture to myself the most Christ- 
like act, the most Messianic entrance into the strange 
and dreadful fate of other men which my imagination 
can conceive. Let me suppose that the purest woman 
in this town, the most sensitive and scrupulous, moved 
by a sense of sisterhood and by a longing pity, gathers 
up all her life, and goes and lives among the lowest 
and most brutal and most foul savages that this earth 
contains. As she enters their land, she leaves her 
own life behind. She accepts their life. Everything, 
except their wickedness, she makes her own. She 
sacrifices her fastidiousness every day. She finds 
herself the victim of habits which are the consequences 
of long years of sin. No sensibility that is not 
shocked, no fine and pure taste that is not wounded. 
Their sin is awful to her, not only because of her 
own purity, but because of the keen understanding 
of its awfulness, which comes from her profound one- 
ness of nature with these sinners. She cannot stand 
ofif and look at them and work for them from a safe 
distance. She is one of them in their common hu- 
manity. In every foul wickedness of theirs she suf- 
fers. She bears their sins a heavy burden on her 
heart. Is it strange that — without any faithlessness 
to her task, or any distrust of the friends at home, 
she cry out across the sea to them, ' Oh ! why have 
you forsaken me ? ' Do not imagine that I think 
that any human sacrifice can truly image His surren- 
der, or any human pain declare the measure of His 
woe. But this is surely the best that earth can show 
us of the kind of agony with which the Christ, who in 
His love, had gone down to the deepest and most 



148 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

terrible depths of humanity, even to being crucified 
between two thieves, seemed for a moment to have 
lost himself, and cried out to the Father, with whom 
He was eternally and inseparably one, ' Oh ! why hast 
Thou forsaken me?' If the cry bewilders us as we 
try to comprehend the deity to which it appeals, it 
may at least reveal to us something of the depth out 
of which it ascends." 

In this deeply spiritual and realistic way does Bishop 
Brooks try to get behind facts and symbols in which 
all the great doctrines of redemption are clothed in 
the Scriptures to the essentialness of the truth, to that 
which appeals irresistibly to the nature of the human 
soul. 

It is not for me to say whether he always succeeds 
in this. Critics enough there are who charge him 
with mysticism, with lack of clearness in the doc- 
trines of the atonement and regeneration. I do not 
think you can get any particular philosophy of the 
atonement out of his sermons, and he certainly never 
tries to tell us just what regeneration is with the 
minuteness and logical precision of Jonathan Edwards. 

But it is not true that he is lacking in clearness of 
conviction and definiteness of teaching; only he never 
fails of the essential humility and reverence of the 
soul impressed with the vastness of truth, and that the 
divine life is greater than the measure of man's mind. 

And here is the basis of his true catholicity. His 
tolerance — and no man has spoken more nobly for 
it by life and speech — is not indifference (to use his 
own analysis) or policy, or helplessness or mere re- 
spect for man, or spiritual sympathy ; but ** the toler- 
ance which grows up in any man who is aware that 
truth is larger than his conception of it, and that 



PHILLIPS BROOKS 149 

what seems to be other men's errors must often be 
other parts of the truth of which he has only the por- 
tion, and that truth is God's child, and the fortunes 
of truth are God's care as well as his. The charity 
for which he pleads is the " love of truth and the love 
of man harmonized and included in the love of God." 

It may be that in seeking the heights where con- 
flicting doctrines and schools may find their unity, he 
ignored the steps first to be taken. That he sought 
that comprehensiveness no one can doubt. In that 
vision he belongs to no school and no sect. He is a 
prophet of the universal church. 

It is pleasant for me to believe with Dr. Gordon: 
that *' he was in too sublime haste to stop and nicely 
adjust ideas to each other or elaborate them into fin- 
ished systems. He clearly saw that all human think- 
ing, theological and philosophical, even in its highest 
results is but provisional and only for a while, to be 
superseded when the eternal day dawns; and with a 
flash, he went beyond the conclusions of the temporal 
mind, and anticipated the look of reality when the im- 
perishable in human thought shall have put on its im- 
mortal vesture." 

He believed in the risen and living Christ. He did 
not rear the cross into a monument. The most real 
and present friend in the world was the friend of sin- 
ners and the Lord of all life. How true and calm 
and sweet and brave it made life! 

** A living Christ, dear friends ! " he closed an Eas- 
ter sermon, *' the old, ever new, ever blessed Easter 
truth ! He liveth ; He was dead -] He is alive forever- 
more. Oh, that everything dead and formal might 
go out of our creed, out of our life, out of our heart 
to-day. He is alive! Do you believe it? What are 



I50 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

you dreary for, O mourner? What are you hesi- 
tating for, O worker? What are you fearing death 
for, O man? Oh, if we could only lift up our heads 
and live with Him; live new lives, high lives, lives of 
hope and love and holiness, to which death should be 
nothing but the breaking away of the last cloud, and 
the letting of the life out to its completion." 

There can be no difference as to the glory and power 
of his presentation of Christ and of the Christ-life 
of the soul. His great message after all is the son- 
ship of man, made possible in the sonship of Christ, 
and the fullness and blessedness of that life. 

" Strangely fascinating was his portrayal of the 
Christ-life, so real, so complete, so joyous, so possible. 
Men went away wondering why they had not known 
it all before, and most men went away with a new pur- 
pose in their lives." '' You are in God's world," he 
would say : *' you are God's child. Those things you 
cannot change; the only peace and rest and happiness 
for you is to accept them and rejoice in them. When 
God speaks to you, you must not make believe to your- 
self that it is the wind blowing or the torrent falHng 
from the hill. You must know that it is God. You 
must gather up the whole power of meeting Him. 
You must be thankful that life is great and not little. 
You must listen as if listening were your life. And 
then, then only can come peace. All sounds will be 
caught up into the prevailing richness of that voice 
of God. The lost proportion will be perfectly re- 
stored. Discord will cease: harmony will be com- 
plete." (V:88.) 

He had faith in men, in their spiritual capacity, in 
the absolute fitness of Christ to human nature and 
that God was in Christ redeeming the world. 



PHILLIPS BROOKS 151 

** To believe in the Incarnation, really to under- 
stand that Christ — and yet to think that we or any 
other men in all the world are essentially incapable 
of spiritual living, is an impossibility." 

He says to the young men at Yale : " There is in 
the congregation as its heart and soul a craving after 
truth. Believe in that." 

His boundless hopefulness — to me the noblest les- 
son from his life and work — was the necessary out- 
come of his faith. 

No doubt it was affected — or promoted by his 
heredity and environment. His vigorous physical 
manhood, the ease of accomplishment inherent in great 
powers, the glad allegiance of multitudes to his word 
— all made hopefulness easy. But it was far deeper 
than this. It was essentially a matter of faith and 
spiritual living. It rested on his visions and convic- 
tions, because he had stronger views of truth, God 
and man, than others had, because he had grown by 
reality of thinking and unselfish service, so that like 
some mountain peak he could lift his head above the 
cloud-rack. 

You have doubtless seen the picture of Bishop 
Brooks that represents almost the full figure ; the head 
erect, a little back of the perpendicular, the face look- 
ing through the open window, and lit up with the rays 
of the morning sun. A true picture and beautifully 
symbolic of the man and his work. He ever had his 
face towards the light. He was one, to use the words 
of Browning, the poet he loved best : 

Who never turned his back, but marched breast forward, 
Never doubted clouds would break: 
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, 
Wrong would triumph ; 



152 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better; 
Sleep to wake. 

Men have spoken contemptuously of his " eternal 
optimism/' but it was this very optimism, his face ever 
in the light, that made men believe in a higher world 
and follow his leadership. 

Perhaps we do not know how much of God 
Was walking with us. 

Surely not forlorn 
Are men, when such great overflow of heaven 
Brings down the light of the eternal morn 
Into the earth's deep shadows, where they plod. 
The slaves of sorrow. 

Something of divine 
Was in his nature, open to the source 
Of love, that master of primeval force. 
As, answering freshly their unfailing sign. 
To the early and the latter rain the sod 
Lies bare, and drinking in by morn and even 
The precious dews that lift it into flower 
Distilled again in fragrance every hour. 

I think if Jesus, whom he loved as Lord, 
Were here again, in such guise might He go, 
So bind all creeds as with a golden cord. 
So with the saint speak, with the sinner so. 
And then remembering all the torrent's rush 
Of praise and blessing o'er the listening hush, 
Remembering the lightning of the glance. 
Remembering the lifted countenance 
White with the prophet's glory that it wore, 
With the Holy Spirit shining through the clay, 
Prophet — yea, I say unto you, and more 
Than a prophet was with us but yesterday! 

Harriet Prescott Spofford. 



VIII 

THE OLD AND NEW EVANGELISM 

The first advances of Christianity have been effected 
by individual influences. It is not overlooking the 
faithful labors of the many, the silent, permeating in- 
fluences of many beautiful examples of Christian grace 
to say that the energy and versatility of one or a few 
have made the eras of spiritual progress. The vic- 
tory over Arianism was won by Athanasius, over 
Pelagianism by Augustine. The conversion of the 
Goths was largely the work of Ulfilas. The English 
were evangelized by Augustine the monk. The Ref- 
ormation begun by Wyclif was perfected by Luther 
and Zwingli. Spener, Wesley, Whitefield, Edwards 
inaugurated the great revival movements of modern 
times. *' It is not meant that these men were isolated 
or sporadic originators of revival influences. They 
were themselves products as well as factors: they 
inherited and absorbed all previous vital Christian 
ideas and stood in the line of the organic development 
of Christian doctrine and life. But it was because 
they were preeminently ordained and adapted to re- 
ceive and diffuse those ideas and that life that in their 
personal labors they were able to give so marked an 
impulse to the spiritual movement." 

The great waves of spiritual impulse that we term 
revivals have been connected in their first movements 
with some prophetic soul, that has caught a new vi- 
sion of truth, or the old truth in new light, bringing 

153 



154 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

out some neglected fact, carrying truth forward to 
its rightful application; a soul for the moment pos- 
sessed with its message, seeing nothing else, its whole 
being stirred by it, giving the whole personality to 
the expression of the truth and sweeping the com- 
munity with the sympathetic contagion of his faith. 

Edwards was such a soul in the isolated villages 
of the Connecticut valley. Just a century later, 
Charles G. Finney did a work of equal power through 
the scattered communities of Central New York. And 
in the last quarter of the nineteenth century Mr. 
Dwight L. Moody reached thousands in our great 
cities. These three men stand for the three stages 
that have marked the history of American Evangel- 
ism. They are men who gathered and expressed in 
their doctrine and persons and work the prophetic 
thought — the spiritual impulse of their generation. 

Edwards, as I have already shown, taught the Sov- 
ereignty of God and the direct and special imparta- 
tion of the Holy Spirit in conversion. He brought 
men into the very presence of the Holy One and made 
men tremble before their Judge. He searched hu- 
man motives, and insisted on nothing less than a heav- 
enly ideal of excellence. And his lesser disciples, 
Hopkins, Bellamy down to Nettleton, with varying de- 
gree of emphasis dwelt upon the same truths. Men 
were urged to pray, to use the means of grace, to 
agonize and wait for the wondrous change brought 
by the sovereign grace of God. 

Mr. Finney and Mr. Moody mark distinct advances 
in Christian doctrine and service, and of these I would 
especially speak. There are some striking parallels in 
the experience and work of Finney and Moody, and 



THE OLD AND NEW EVANGELISM 155 

perhaps just as striking contrasts. At any rate we 
can hardly miss the message of such lives. They are 
alike in coming from the people, without the aid of 
the schools; in the singleness, simplicity and earnest- 
ness of their message; in the emphasis they put upon 
conduct; and in the far-reaahing outcome of their 
labor, beyond the expected work of an evangelist. 

Mr. Charles G. Finney was a lawyer, in the fron- 
tier town of Adams, N. Y., without early advantages, 
but, like Mr. Lincoln, of remarkable logical keenness, 
humanity, wit and common sense, and was not lack- 
ing in self-discipline. He knew men and nature — 
and his one book was Shakspeare. His education 
was in the school of life. He did not own a Bible 
until he was thirty. Then, apparently, without hu- 
man helps, wrought upon by no visible means — the 
truth that he must have known in a dim way from 
childhood working with his naturally lofty spirit — 
produced a change as marked as Paul's. In the tem- 
ple of the woods, in the holy place of his own room, 
he had visions of Christ as distinct and glorious as 
met Saul on the Damascus road. His whole nature 
was overpowered by them. In the quiet of his room, 
he would have such views of God's excellence — that 
his desires would flow in strong passion towards God. 
There was but one thing for such a man to do. He 
never took up his law books again, or tried a single 
case. He had to speak what he had seen, first in his 
own church — and the whole community was soon in 
the most intense religious interest. Then in neigh- 
boring villages — until his labors were sought for far 
and near — and without concert of plan — by the sin- 
gle influence of his overmastering message and pas- 



156 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

sion to reach men, Mr. Finney stood as the leader 
of the most aggressive movement in the Church. His 
pastor, Mr. Gale, a Princeton man, was ashamed of 
his first sermon. His Brethren in the Presbytery, 
though they finally licensed him, urged him to go to 
the Seminary. But Finney was right in ignoring the 
opinion of men bound by ecclesiastical opinion and 
habit — and leading his own free life. He made the 
Bible his one study, and with the constant prayer 
for the Spirit's light, he concentrated his remark- 
able powers upon its interpretation, and used its truths 
to convince men as a lawyer uses his evidence to win 
his case. 

Men were not accustomed to hear religious truth 
spoken in that way. God, sin, atonement, repentance 
were made as real as houses and lands. He ignored 
the terminology of the religious schools, and the man- 
ner of the pulpit, and clothed his truth in homely, 
everyday speech, and with illustrations that would 
appeal to the experience of his hearers. 

The chief characteristic of his preaching was his 
careful and thorough reasoning — the lawyer's habit 
of mind. *' He carefully and slowly laid down and 
discussed the fundamental proposition upon which ac- 
tion was to be based, so that whatever movement of 
feeling there was should be well grounded in a per- 
ception of the truth. He always took pains to under- 
stand the position occupied by those he was endeavor- 
ing to persuade, and was careful not to proceed with 
his argument till he was sure he had found a common 
ground of argument respecting facts and principles. 
Thus the intense feeling following his preaching was 
the result of his exposition of truth, and not of any 
great attempt to produce excitement." His logical 



THE OLD AND NEW EVANGELISM 157 

powers were not spent in the discussion of abstract 
truth — in trying to unfold the mysterious works of 
the Eternal, but in the analysis of the facts of the 
Gospel and the facts of human experience. In the 
latter he was a master, fearless and minute, and even 
personal, passing at times what would seem the cour- 
tesies of public speech. But his most searching word 
was with largeheartedness, with no spirit of bitter- 
ness or personal spite. He treated of concrete sins. 
He discussed them so minutely, he hunted them to 
their hiding places, he brought them out into the light 
of heaven, he held them up unsparingly to the judg- 
ment of God, that sometimes the whole audience would 
be bowed under the conviction of sin. 

In a sermon on the Seared Conscience he had ninety- 
five specifications of the things that may sear the con- 
science. He preached the sermon at Oberlin as an 
old man and has this specific and personal reference, 
on the sin of heedlessly borrowing tools: almost an 
eccentric example of his concreteness. ** Just con- 
sider the condition in which I found myself yesterday. 
I engaged a number of men to make my garden and 
put in my crops ; but when I went to look for my farm- 
ing tools, I could not find them. Brother Mahan 
borrowed my plow some time ago, and has forgotten 
to bring it back. Brother Morgan has borrowed my 
harrow, and I presume has it still. Brother Beecher 
has my spade and my hoe, and so my tools were all 
scattered. Where many of them are, no man knows. 
I appeal to you, how can society exist when such a 
simple duty as that of returning borrowed tools ceases 
to rest as a burden on the conscience? It is in such 
delinquencies as these that the real state of our hearts 
is brought to the light of day." 



IS8 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

The minute analysis of motive and act was not only 
the lawyer's habit, but the outcome of his conception 
of truth and character. He held Edwards' doctrine 
that true virtue was the choice of the ultimate good 
of being. And thus each act arose out of this choice 
and so was totally good or bad. And so his effort was 
constantly to bring out the nature of each choice, and 
show its bearing upon the ultimate object of worthy 
being. His appeal was to reason and conscience. He 
believed that there was absolute correspondence be- 
tween the Gospel and the teachings of man's moral 
nature. He begins with man and makes the constant 
appeal to the moral sense. His whole skill is used 
in unfolding the evidences, and then narrowing the 
sphere of immediate action so as to press immediate 
duty. And in an age when doctrine had been exalted, 
when the whole thought of religion had dwelt upon 
the transcendent God — his nature of grace — and 
religion was largely an otherworldliness, Finney's 
specification of sin and duty made religion intensely 
practical, and aroused consciences that had easily slept 
under discussions of theological subtleties. 

*' He will never be a preacher," says Dr. Stalker, 
" who does not know how to get at the conscience. 
We are making a great mistake about this. We are 
preaching to the fancy, to the imagination, to the in- 
tellect, to feeling, to will; and no doubt all these must 
be preached to; but it is in the conscience that the 
battle is to be won or lost. In many parts of Chris- 
tendom it is dying out; and where it is extinct, the 
whole work of Christianity has to be done over again." 

When he had presented the doctrine and the duty, 
he pressed men with every motive that he could com- 
mand for immediate decision. And here the methods 



THE OLD AND NEW EVANGELISM 159 

which sometimes were used, and aroused hostile criti- 
cism, were nothing more than the effort to secure 
action — however small — which would place men in 
the way of repentance and faith. He has given him- 
self the practical statement of his doctrine. ** If sin- 
ners are to be regenerated by the influence of truth, 
argument and persuasion, then ministers can see what 
they have to do, and how it is they are to be workers 
together with God. So also sinners may see that they 
are not to wait for a physical regeneration or influ- 
ence, but must submit to and embrace the truth, if 
they ever expect to be saved. Ministers should aim 
at and expect the regeneration of sinners on the spot, 
and before they leave the house of God." Here is the 
foundation of his effort in revival work. He pressed 
every truth home upon others as though he expected 
to convert them himself. He urged upon all Chris- 
tians the duty of prayer for the aid of the Spirit. He 
threw upon the soul the responsibility of immediately 
accepting or rejecting the truth then apprehended. 

Of course the personality of the man had much to 
do with his power on his audiences. He was a splen- 
did man physically, with exceptional grace of manner, 
and clear, flexible voice. He had no mannerisms, per- 
fect naturalness, and the actor's power of represent- 
ing character or scene. He must have been a sort 
of John B. Gough in the pulpit. 

It is not hard to trace the effect of his work. God 
was in it, and it left a lasting impress for the higher 
Hfe of the people. 

There were extravagances connected with some of 
the services, and poor imitators followed his path that 
sometimes brought discredit upon the cause of truth. 
Men of the theology of the Alexanders and Hodges 



l6o THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

discredited his work because of his doctrine of hu- 
man responsibility, calling for the immediate and de- 
cisive act of the will. But this was the very truth 
that made him a prophet-voice and profoundly stirred 
the generation. His work carried Christians to a 
higher pitch of experience, renewed churches and 
reached multitudes that were practically ignored by 
the Church. He reached strong men especially. At 
one time nearly the entire bar of Rochester was con- 
verted. Forty men went into the ministry from his 
labor in that city. 

A young business man of Auburn drifted into the 
first church one evening, one who had left the church 
on Mr. Finney's first visit, and had helped to form 
the congregation of the second. He was a distiller 
getting rich fast, at a time when the business was 
generally thought respectable. He listened curiously 
at first, then intently at the close and earnest reason- 
ing, was convinced, felt his sin, made his choice, 
quietly went out and deliberately broke open the casks 
and let the liquor flow into the street. It was an 
example of the practical godliness that flowed from 
Mr. Finney's work. He was not distinctly an anti- 
slavery advocate, but interest in the oppressed never 
failed to be a result of his work. And in his connec- 
tion with the Tappans, the New York Evangelist, the 
Broadway Tabernacle, and the founding and growth 
of Oberlin University, he was not least among the 
forces that made for an emancipated race and a re- 
newed and purified conception of the national life. 
'* For spiritual thrift in the individual, for the strength- 
ening of the Church, for humanity towards the poor, 
the weak, the outcast, we need to thank God for the 



THE OLD AND NEW EVANGELISM l6l 

outpouring of the Spirit upon the labor of Mr. Fin- 
ney." 

Mr. Dwight L. Moody has been the exponent and 
leader of the newer evangelism. The story can be 
more briefly told. Many men now living have heard 
Mr. Moody ; his work is open before us. He too has 
a distinct message, expressing the thought that had 
slowly possessed the Christian consciousness of the 
generation. His message did not come from lonely 
vigil, from rapt meditation upon heavenly things, but 
out of the toil and turmoil, the poverty and sin of a 
great city. The same compassion stirred his heart 
as Christ felt when he looked upon the multitudes, 
scattered as sheep having no shepherd. He was so 
full of it, that he met a stranger on the street of Chi- 
cago, and stopped him with the glad word : " The 
grace of God has appeared to all men bringing salva- 
tion." And this is Moody's word, the word that has 
arrested the multitudes and turned their hearts to God. 
The grace of God. The love of God. Not sover- 
eignty, not personal responsibility, but divine compas- 
sion. And it is a new message in the degree that he 
emphasized it, and in the degree to which he aban- 
doned himself to it. He touched the very heart of 
the Gospel, at once bringing to bear upon men the 
strongest and purest motive it is possible for the hu- 
man heart to feel. It is not weak because of the 
strong way that he grasps it — the compassionate, suf- 
fering, sacrificing love of God. 

" If I thought I could only make the world believe 
that God is love, I would only take that text and go 
up and down the earth trying to counteract what Satan 



l62 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

has been telling men — that God is not love. It would 
not take twenty-four hours to make the world come 
to God, if you could only make them believe — God 
is love." ^ 

Compare the themes of Mr. Moody's sermons with 
those of Edwards', and you will see the changed em- 
phasis, the humanness of the message. In a single 
volume, *' Love and Sympathy, God is love, Christ 
came to seek and to save. Christian love," in every 
form the glad tidings. 

Here you have Mr. Moody at his best. His great 
unselfish heart, not thinking of self, but beating strong 
and warm for the men for whom Christ died; his 
quic^k and subtle insight into truth; the simple and 
homely idiom, the speech of the shop and market and 
street that instantly conveyed the thought and sym- 
pathy too; the truth in broad, simple object-lessons of 
living experience making their immediate appeal to the 
affections ; the entire naturalness of thought and man- 
ner, no farce, no cant, no sentimentalism ; the irre- 
pressible ardor of his personal conviction; a sturdy, 
wholesome, manly man, speaking to his fellow men 
the truth of the supreme love. 

He was a blessing to multitudes. He was a teacher 
and quickener of the Church and the ministry; teach- 
ing the lesson of definiteness and aggressiveness of 
Hfe — simplicity and earnestness of speech; he is one 
of the forces that has developed the social conscious- 
ness of our generation, the increasing sensitiveness 
to contrasts of condition; and in his schools and con- 
ferences have started impulses of world-wide evangel- 
ism. His work was of God, not only in bringing men 

1 Read *' Glad Tidings,** p. 245. 



THE OLD AND NEW EVANGELISM 163 

to faith, but in the quickening through the manifold 
veins of Christian life. 

The connection between the evangelism of the past 
generation and the present day is chiefly in the fact of 
organization. 

It is natural that the social and economic charac- 
teristics of our age should also mark the religious 
movements. The most minute and thorough plans 
are made in industry, looking to the cooperation of 
great numbers of men. The laws of trade are stud- 
ied, the needs of distant markets are considered, noth- 
ing is left to chance that can be formed and tabulated 
and reduced to science. Something is still left to in- 
dividual enterprise and initiative, but business on a 
large scale to-day depends upon the efficiency of organ- 
ization. 

And this spirit has passed into the work of evan- 
gelism. In fact the organization of such work as Mr. 
Sunday's in advance preparation and the actual man- 
agement of the campaign is not surpassed by any mod- 
ern business. 

The campaigns of Mr. Moody were well organized. 
There was always an effort to unite people of all 
churches. Sometimes special tabernacles were built 
to emphasize the unity of the effort and to hold the 
throngs too large for any church. There were large 
choruses and trained ushers and a body of special 
workers in the inquiry rooms, at the after meetings. 
The inquiry room was a feature unused in evangel- 
ism before the day of Mr. Moody. " The altar, the 
mourners' bench, various methods had been tried to 
secure some public step on the part of the hearer* 
to express their interest or the choice of faith. 



l64 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

The inquiry room was a distinct step in advance 
as regards method. It aimed to conserve the interest 
of the public meeting and the spiritual contagion of 
the multitude and in more quiet and personal ways 
secure the action of the will. It furnished something 
of a religious clinic and recognized the sacredness of 
each life, the personal and individual ways of faith. 
It also recognized the part of the Church in evangel- 
ism and used the influence of friendship and neigh- 
borship. 

There was the use of popular and easily sung songs. 
Though Mr. Moody could not sing himself, he under- 
stood the psychological effect of song by a great au- 
dience and he kept the people singing under Mr. San- 
key's inspiring leadership, long after some were im- 
patient for the voice of the evangelist. 

There was a simple and effective organization in 
Mr. Moody's efforts, but there was never the sound 
or the sight of machinery. The preacher and his 
message were the chief things. And the preacher al- 
ways exalted his Master and honored the Church and 
the ministry that gave him their hearty cooperation. 

There was the spontaneous, voluntary element of 
true life. The contagion of crowds was guarded by 
the atmosphere of seriousness and reverence, and 
inquirers were dealt with carefully and separately 
as individuals. And no method of the market place 
jarred upon the solemnity of the soul's choice. 

There were no extravagances about Mr. Moody's 
meetings. They brought thousands to faith, added to 
the spiritual life of the churches, gave ministers a 
new directness and devotion in their preaching, and 
started movements and institutions of world-wide m- 
fluence. The Student Conferences and the Missionary 



THE OLD AND NEW EVANGELISM 165 

Volunteer Movements had their origin at Northfield. 
There was the eifort to make the best uses of hu- 
man means and methods, but with chief reUance upon 
the truths and the spirit and the recognition of the 
individuality and mystery of God's deahngs with a 
human life. 

The modern evangeHsm has little of the sponta- 
neity and voluntariness that we usually associate with 
spiritual life in its critical changes and new measures 
of power. It seems too cut and dried for that. There 
is the recognition of the power and the necessity of a 
united Christian community. There is the reliance 
upon neighborly interest and the earnest prayer of 
Christian people. This is a true emphasis upon spir- 
itual preparation. 

There is the use of great choruses, the constant 
singing by vast audiences that breaks into accustomed 
feelings, and the appeal of the most moving of all arts. 
Certainly the Sunday meetings would be robbed of 
much of their attractiveness and of their estimated 
results without the skilled musical director. ** There 
comes Rody," said a rough voice back of me one 
night. *' He is more than one-half the show." 

And the electric atmosphere, in its marching dele- 
gations and songs and cheers, is more like a great po- 
litical convention or even a football game than that 
solemn stillness where God's voice is heard and men 
make their peace with Him. 

The sermons are the truths of a former age, before 
the science of Biblical criticism and comparative reli- 
gion was known, the bald literalism of the Bible, the 
bold appeal to fear — a hell of physical torments. 
The sermons are given with a sincerity and earnest'- 



l66 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

ness that none can doubt, and often with a personal 
charm and persuasiveness that few can resist. Men 
who deny his truths still admit the power of his per- 
son. There is no prophetic element in his preaching, 
no new light upon truth and life. He speaks only 
what he has been taught, the truth and incident and 
illustration gathered from a multitude of sources, but 
all with the definiteness and concreteness of a man 
terribly in earnest. That he has won multitudes to 
the Christian faith there is no doubt. That many bad 
men under his influence have changed their lives is 
equally certain. 

I suppose he has spoken face to face with more 
people than any other evangelist. During his eight 
weeks in Philadelphia he preached one hundred and 
twenty-two sermons, to 2,330,000 people, according 
to the record of a responsible paper, the Evening 
Ledger, 

The biographers of Mr. Sunday and his special dis- 
ciples easily call him the greatest of all evangelists. 
But it is too early properly to estimate his place and 
his power. 

He is more of a reformer than a teacher of spirit- 
ual religion, and he seems to have helped men to be 
bold in attacking certain personal and social evils, 
though he has not deepened the religious life of the 
age. In his reforming messages, like the sermon on 
Booze, he is a pure individualist; he seems to have 
no idea of the complex social forces of modern life, 
how temperance is a matter of the home and the living 
wage as well as the no saloon. 

Though he insists on the unity of Protestant 
churches in his support, his treatment of ministers and 
churches, and his attitude towards modern religious 



THE OLD AND NEW EVANGELISM 167 

ideas do not make for unity of religious thought and 
life. 

The sensational advertising of his work, the unreal 
statement of its result, the commercial emphasis al- 
ways felt are so contrary to the child-like spirit of the 
Gospel and its law of sacrifice, and so unlike the spirit 
of the teacher and missionary and social worker in all 
lands, that men will inevitably grow critical towards 
this type of evangelism. 

Already there are evidences of it. The fact that the 
Bishops of the Methodist Episcopal Church North, a 
revival church in its whole history, have urged their 
ministers to be their own evangelists and to connect 
such efforts with the church building, is indication 
of sentiment that will certainly crystallize in a new 
method. 

There are many other devoted and effective evan- 
geHsts besides Mr. Sunday, though most of them copy 
his methods, though none that compares with him in 
gift and fame. 

Shall the tabernacle evangelism be a nine days' won- 
der, or will it have a permanent and important place in 
the history of American evangelism? It is too early 
to make a safe prediction. We are too close to it to 
make a just estimate. 

If it shall mark a critical step in the progress of the 
American church, I think it must be for its method 
and not for its message. How can a method so 
worldly produce abiding spiritual results? 

It certainly lacks the prophetic element that has 
marked every previous era of evangelism, the new 
light upon religion, the reinterpretation of the Gospel 
and of man in more vital terms. 

It lacks also the social conception of religion. It 



l68 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

is superficial in the estimate of Christian character 
and the mission of the Christian life. Christ's invi- 
tation and command is not only personal but social. 
It is not only to turn from the evil of sin to the for- 
giveness and peace of the Father's house, but to seek 
first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, to let 
personal interest be secondary to the welfare of others, 
to let the dead bury their dead and publish abroad the 
Kingdom of God. 

The tests of modern evangelism are not thorough 
or far-reaching enough for the best ethical and social 
standards of to-day. They do not reach to the breadth 
of God's commandments: they come far short of the 
mind of Christ. 

They are not sure to make a good man, i. e., a life 
filled with the new motive of good will, with a mis- 
sionary passion for goodness. 

The over-emphasis upon individualism, upon per- 
sonal salvation fails to give the sense of the unity 
of life, of the importance of the Church as the chief 
agent of the Kingdom of God; and its eye is so fixed 
upon another world that it cannot see the practical 
needs and issues of this, and make faith the instru- 
ment of a sound and wholesome earthly life. 

It also should be said that evangelism — not revival- 
ism — is the normal and necessary work of the Chris- 
tian Church. The missionary motive is primal. The 
first impulse of the new life is to seek another, and 
this winning of men for faith and all that faith stands 
for is the life and condition of a true church. 

Evangelism has been too narrowly conceived as the 
work of a few men, as the hope of certain favored sea- 
sons of religion. It is the first duty of every pastor 
and teacher, its aim and spirit should pervade the en- 



THE OLD AND NEW EVANGELISM 169 

tire life of the Church. The pastor must do the work 
of an evangeHst for his own people. He must preach 
and pray for constant conversions. He must expect 
them, watch for them, and use every indication of 
spiritual interest, as one whose supreme desire and 
work is to get hold of lives. 

While each man should strive to do his work in his 
own way and meet his personal responsibility for souls 
like a man, the ministry as a class need to cultivate 
the spirit of openness and readiness, understanding 
the times, willing to welcome any message or measure 
or man that has the promise of new spiritual power. 

It is evident that we are living in a transition pe- 
riod. While followers of Mr. Moody or Mr. Sun- 
day, disciples in a true sense, are often blessed in their 
work, it is also noticeable that no general interest cen- 
ters in the work of the evangelist. The criticisms of 
Mr. Moody's last services in New York, from kindly 
and spiritual sources, showed that he failed to be a 
present leader, that the great impulses he started had 
largely spent their force, better to say had been in- 
corporated into the life of the Church. And the same 
is still truer of Mr. Sunday. 

I have already hinted at well-known, often discussed 
facts in the development of Christianity. Men like 
Mr. Finney and Mr. Moody are both product and 
force. They are the voice of their times and the voice 
to their time, and in both senses God's voice. It takes 
time for religious sentiment to gather and become 
controlling forces. Men think of the truth and of 
their times. New conditions demand new applications 
of the Gospel. Thousands of men are thinking and 
praying and working. At last some man — like 
Finney or Moody — with peculiar nature and train- 



170 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

ing that puts them in closer touch with men and the 
Holy Spirit, some man with clearer eye and stronger 
feehng, voices the need and the Christian thought of 
his age. Men say that once more a prophet has arisen, 
and they either cast him out or follow him with glad 
assent. The social forces of the generation work 
with him. ** Men listen with rapture while he voices 
their unutterable feelings." '* He goes like a tongue 
of fire, and the multitudes bend before him." 

But mankind moves on, and the prophet is a voice 
of yesterday. Great forces are at work in our time. 
We can feel them, if we cannot wholly understand 
their meaning. The moral idealism, the spirit of good 
will, of justice and humanity and brotherhood, awak- 
ened by the Great War, the hope of a new age, cannot 
finally be defeated by the forces of selfish, materialistic 
reaction. At last some man will catch God's life upon 
the new age and proclaim it; and whether in the for- 
mulation of Christian thought or the practical applica- 
tion of Christianity to social conditions he shall be a 
man to whom the spiritual world lies open and whose 
passion for truth and for humanity shall be a compel- 
ling and uplifting force. 

It is not our work to get ready for such men, and 
least of all to wait for them, but to do our work with 
all the faith and faithfulness we can attain. And 
when God gets ready for His leaders. His prophets, it 
is ours to have the faith that shall recognize their di- 
vine authentication and to welcome them as a living 
word of God. 



IX 

SOME DISIUNCTIVE CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE AMERI- 
CAN PULPIT 

The story of the American Pulpit is the story of the 
Continent. The singular veiling of this western 
world from the eyes of men, the providential opening 
when the most creative forces of the modern world 
had begun their working, the romance and heroism of 
settlement and conquest, the contest of races and types 
of religion, the religious divisions of Europe trans- 
planted here, the rank soil growing many new and in- 
dividual forms, all voicing this complex life and shap- 
ing it to larger meaning, the occupation of a continent 
with Christian institutions, the unfolding of a purpose 
of ever-increasing good. The story of the American 
pulpit is the story of the frontier, the growth of early 
settlements, the leaders of states, the expanding life 
of the nation, a story of prophetic, devoted labor, of 
directive, inspiring force. 

There are some striking features in the history of 
American Christianity and so of its pulpit. One can 
speak of them as the providential elements of our life. 

It is no chance that the opening of America came 
at the hour of quickened intellectual and religious life 
for Europe. The new sciences had begun. Inven- 
tions and discoveries had given a new interest to this 
earth and to human life. And men came to these 
shores with a new interest in nature and with new 

171 



1/2 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

knowledge of her forces — a Briaraeus with a hun- 
dred arms for the conquest of nature. And the in- 
dividual was freed from the absolute authority of 
church and creed and made to feel his personal relation 
to God and his personal responsibility for knowing 
the truths of religion. The contests for religious lib- 
erty were soon transformed to these shores, and a 
free, progressive type of Christianity gained the vic- 
tory here over a priestly form of religion in league 
with the State. 

And we have to be grateful that in the many peo- 
ples that tried to colonize in America, French, Span- 
ish, Germans, English, the mother races of the Teu- 
tonic stock, the English and German, vigorous and 
progressive, receiving the new light, guided by a more 
spiritual purpose, soon gained the ascendency. 

A third providential fact in the early Christianity 
of America is the individualism that kept any church 
from becoming dominant. The theocracy of the New 
England colonies soon yielded to other forms of Chris- 
tianity. Each colony had its particular type. Old 
World divisions of the Church were multiplied here. 
All were feeble and struggling. All were partial and 
imperfect expressions of the one great truth. It was 
not possible then for men to have a comprehensive 
faith. The development of religion has been by ir- 
regular and conflicting movements. And the very di- 
visions of the Church and even their conflicts made 
possible a nobler religious life in the end. They pre- 
vented a narrow type of dogmatism and worship from 
becoming fixed upon American Christianity. 

But as our national life has grown, as we have 
gained the consciousness of unity and purpose, there 
has been a natural striving for greater unity of reli- 



SOME DISTINCTIVE CONTRIBUTIONS I73 

gious life. Conviction has grown of the weakness 
of our extreme individuaHsm. We have too often put 
an ** ism " in the place of the Gospel. We have ex- 
pressed an eccentric individualism in the place of a 
simple and comprehensive Christianity. 

And our generation has been marked by movements 
towards Christian unity. The feeling for kinship that 
has marked the nations, the families of peoples draw- 
ing together into a strong national life has had its 
corresponding movement in religious life. Liberty of 
conscience, freedom of teaching and worship have be- 
come principles and habits of our life, and now it is 
felt that the singleness and greatness of the religious 
life should be emphasized; that divided sects, broken 
and warring fragments of Christianity cannot prop- 
erly express the one body of Christ. The unity of 
national life should be matched by the unity of faith. 
The generation has seen the union of several families 
of churches, and the gathering of kindred churches in 
conferences and congresses for the discussion of their 
common interest, and gatherings and associations of 
Christians, regardless of church connections, for young 
men and young women, for missionary and social 
service. The spirit of God speaking in these great 
stirrings and the very need of the age call for a united 
Christianity. The tendency is strong and the prom- 
ise is great. 

From the history of our own land, we may not 
expect in the Christianity of the future a uniformity, 
or an organic unity, but a harmony, a federation for 
religious purpose. 

The types of the American pulpit that have stood 
for the churches of the past will not be wholly lost, 
but modified by each other and harmonized by their 



174 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

conception and spirit into a single institution, the 
American Pulpit. 

It is now our work to trace certain leading indi- 
vidual types of the pulpit, to estimate certain denomi- 
national contributions to our pulpit. 



The Congregational Pulpit 

I mention the Congregational pulpit first, for it 
had the earliest development and probably, in propor- 
tion to its numbers, has exerted the greatest influence 
on our national life. 

While the Church of England, through the chap- 
lains of the Virginia colony, was the first religious 
worship and teaching in the colonies, the churches had 
a feeble and uncertain life through the colonial days, 
and not until after the Revolution was the Episcopal 
Church fully established with Bishops of her own 
and entered upon the career of worthy development 
and influence. 

New England from the first developed her own 
church and ministry. The members of the Plymouth 
colony were Separatists. They had been hunted and 
tortured for their spiritual faith and so had no love 
for the mother church. The Pilgrims in their west- 
ward iourney had broken all connection with the 
Church of England. Not so the Puritans, who came 
so largely in the second decade, driven from home by 
the persecution of Laud, and formed the bulk of the 
Massachusetts colony. They loved the Church of 
England and had no idea of separating from her. 
They were the spiritual and reforming element in a 
worldly and corrupt church and they were driven 



SOME DISTINCTIVE CONTRIBUTIONS 1/5 

forth to the venture of the New World. When the 
first considerable company of Puritans set sail in their 
noble little fleet of six vessels, they were accompanied 
by three approved clergymen of the Church of Eng- 
land. When they took their last sight of England 
at Land's End, one of the ministers, Mr. Higginson, 
said to the company : *' We will not say, as the Sep- 
aratists were wont to say at their leaving of England, 
Farewell, Babylon ! farewell, Rome ! but we will say, 
Farewell, dear England, farewell, the Church of God 
in England, and all the Christian friends there! We 
do not go to New England as Separatists from the 
Church of England, though we cannot but separate 
from the corruptions in it; but we go to practice the 
positive part of church reformation and propagate the 
Gospel in America." 

It is a wonder that the two elements, Puritan and 
Pilgrim, radically as they differed in the Old World, 
should be practically one in their conception of Church 
and State in the New World. The necessity of union 
in the face of common foes and tasks, and the isola- 
tion and freedom of the untried land, no doubt, 
wrought the wonderful change and assimilation. They 
opened their Bibles and founded a State as nearly as 
they could conceive on the principles found therein. 
They studied the New Testament and developed their 
church on the simple and free lines there found. Each 
church was independent, electing its own minister and 
officers, directing its own life, yet uniting with others 
for support and comfort and instruction, and for the 
growth of the institutions of a Christian society. 

From the first the Congregational churches had a 
notable pulpit. The first ministers that came from 
England were practically all University men. Th^ 



176 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

majority were from Immanuel College, Cambridge, 
and it is interesting to note that the same College has 
preserved the Puritan or evangelical spirit to the 
present time. Union Seminary, New York City, has 
recently drawn one of its Professors from the same 
College. And when the Puritan emigration largely 
ceased with the beginning of the Puritan Common- 
wealth, and the scattered hamlets in the wilderness 
began to multiply, and to need more ministers than 
England could lend, the colonists began to choose and 
train their own men. First Harvard and soon after 
Yale were founded to raise up a goodly number of 
godly ministers. 

The church and the ministry were honored as they 
have been nowhere else in the world. The minister 
had the first social position in the community, as is 
seen from the early catalogues of Harvard where 
the names of students are printed in order of the 
social rank of their parents. It was as much an honor 
to have a boy enter the ministry as it has been in 
Presbyterian Scotland. The first fruits of life and 
the best were devoted to the pulpit. 

The Puritans brought the truths of their theology 
and their supreme interest in them to America, and 
developed them unmodified by other forces. So Puri- 
tain theology gave the substance and form of the 
preaching. The sermons were systems of truth 
wrought out with persistent and enthusiastic indus- 
try. Thorough education, the highest social influence, 
and absorbed interest in theology were the directive 
influences of the early Congregational pulpit. 

It was certainly a notable pulpit. The first minis- 
ters were picked men. There was no better man in 
the pulpit of his day than John Cotton, who resigne4 



SOME DISTINCTIVE CONTRIBUTIONS 177 

his place in the old Boston that he might have a freer 
voice in the young Boston of the West., Eliot, apostle 
to the Indians, the Mathers, father and son, Th. Hooker 
of Hartford and John Davenport of New Haven car- 
ried on the high Puritan traditions. 

I have already spoken especially of Jonathan Ed- 
wards, the most notable figure of eighteenth century 
America. His sermons had a single but profound 
thought, a subtle insight into the processes of the 
human soul, a purity of form and a quiet intensity 
of manner that searched the heart and greatly stirred 
its feelings. He was the chief force in the Great 
Awakening of 1740, that roused the Church from its 
formalism, won the people unrecognized and un- 
reached by formal religion and through the calling out 
of individual manhood and the deepening of feeling 
prepared the colonists to feel their wrongs and to 
take arms for their redress. Edwards did not stand 
alone. Samuel Hopkins of Newport, the hero of Mrs. 
Stowe's *' The Minister's Wooing," was not unworthy 
to be in the same generation. And the evangel was 
proclaimed by a succession of flaming tongues such 
as Bellamy and Nettleton. 

The first notable Congregational preacher of our 
national life is President Timothy Dwight of Yale 
College. He did a work for the American church 
hardly second to that of Edwards. The beginning of 
the nineteenth century was the darkest hour religiously 
in our history. 

The great awakening of the previous century had 
spent its force and had been followed by a depressing 
and deadening reaction. The Revolution had taken 
the best men from the parishes and even from the 
pulpits and sadly interfered with the regular serv- 



178 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

ices of religion. The excitements of war had broken 
in upon the orderly habits of life and left the marks 
of laxity and indulgence. French unbelief and French 
levity were commended by French love of liberty. Old 
restraints of society and religion were relaxed and men 
did not hesitate to question the most sacred beliefs of 
life in the name of progress. It was fashionable to 
doubt. Criticism of the Church was a badge of intel- 
lectual superiority. The Christian students of Yale 
could be counted on the fingers of one hand, and Bishop 
Meade of Virginia said that he expected to find a 
disciple of Tom Paine in every educated man he met. 
Timothy Dwight came to the Kingdom for such 
a time as this. He was a man of rare attraction in 
person and manner. He was alert to all the interests 
of life, and a trained thinker in religion. He had the 
imagination and sympathy of a poet, and helped to 
bring finer feeling and taste into worship, finishing 
Watts' versification of the Psalms and adding Eng- 
lish hymns of his own, chief of which, " I love thy 
kingdom. Lord," marks the beginning of American 
hymnology. He frankly and sympathetically discussed 
questions of religion with his classes in the College. 
His most effective work was the sermons in the Col- 
lege chapel. He took up the chief facts and truths 
of Christianity in order, and brought wealth of knowl- 
edge and experience, his rhetorical skill, his feeling 
for truth and his sympathy for young men to their 
clear and persuasive teaching. His course covered 
the four years, and the sermons he practically re- 
peated to every generation of students. He turned the 
tide of the College. The sermons were repeated in 
churches and to bodies of ministers. They were the 
renewal of faith, the quickener of the spiritual life. 



SOME DISTINCTIVE CONTRIBUTIONS 1/9 

In published form they constantly renewed their min- 
istry. And they were a notable force in that deep 
and pervasive religious renewal that marked the first 
years of the century and gave to American Christian- 
ity that outreaching missionary spirit that sent the 
Gospel to the farthest limits of our own land and 
made the Church partake of the vision of Christ in 
the world-wide mission of the Kingdom. 

What Timothy Dwight did at the beginning of the 
nineteenth century, Dr. Lyman Beecher helped to do 
in the second quarter of the century. He was more 
rugged and independent and versatile. He met the 
critical and philosophic spirit that questioned great 
catholic facts and truths of Christianity, and refined 
the Gospel into an ethic. The Unitarian movement, 
born of the critical and revolutionary forces that 
marked the opening of the nineteenth century, but had 
been long preparing, the scientific, philosophic, liter- 
ary and democratic forces that exalted man and made 
a revolt against the hard and fast dogmatism of the 
Calvinistic churches. The spirit had been slowly per- 
meating the churches of eastern New England, without 
being called Unitarian or making a division in the 
Congregational ranks. When Mr. Ware, a pronounced 
radical, was elected to the chair of divinity at Har- 
vard and the chief college thus pronounced itself 
friendly to the new thought, it was time for men to 
speak out and the lines were rapidly and sharply 
drawn. When the first contests were over, it was 
found that Boston and its vicinity was practically 
Unitarian. The wealth, the social and literary in- 
fluence, the leaders in the pulpit and the churches were 
of the liberal faith. The orthodox were feeble and 
despised. 



i8o THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

Lyman Beecher became the chief pulpit defender of 
the historic faith. He had already won a name as a 
spirited and courageous teacher of truth. As a young 
man his sermon against duelling had made the nation 
hear. At Litchfield, Connecticut, he was in the pres- 
ence of the most important law school of the day, 
and in contact with legal minds trained in dialectic 
skill. In paper and magazine, on platform and in 
pulpit he discussed the essential truths of Christian- 
ity. His polemic was inspired and tempered by his 
Christian love. To win souls he held to be the great- 
est thing in the world. And so when he went to the 
church in Boston, it was with powers matured and 
enriched and directed by a great passion. He was a 
pastoral evangelist. He preached the truths of the 
cross with flaming zeal. He brought men to faith 
and loyalty. He inspired others with his own pas- 
sion to win men. His sturdy common sense matched 
his zeal and his humanity was so racy and so rich 
that he won men strongly opposed to his doctrine. 
He had to bear scorn and opposition and his church 
was derided as '' Brimstone Corner," but he bravely 
held his place and gave heart to men and powerfully 
influenced his generation. He was like the prophetic 
leader pictured in Isaiah, a rock in the desert that kept 
men from being overwhelmed by the drift of unbe- 
lief, and under his shadow faith found its life and re- 
freshment. 

The churches of New England are largely loyal to 
Christ, and the majority at Harvard are evangelical 
in their faith, in part at least through the preaching 
of Lyman Beecher. 

It is possible that a mediating thinker like Horace 
Bushnell had as much influence, perhaps more, in mak- 



SOME DISTINCTIVE CONTRIBUTIONS l8l 

ing Christianity the permeating force of modern life 
than the sermon-polemics of Lyman Beecher. Both 
were noble servants of the truth. BushnelFs message 
has already been given that Christian doctrine is formu- 
lated Christian experience. He was a creative thinker, 
but held that Infinite mystery could not be brought into 
postulates of reason. But the spirit of man was the 
candle of the Lord and could make a path of bright 
reality through the eternal mystery. He was guided 
by his heart and not by the logic that filled the air 
about him. Many will agree with a writer in the New 
York Tribune that '* Every man's life a plan of God " 
is one of the greatest sermons of the English-speaking 
pulpit. 

Dr. Richard S. Storrs is a man altogether of a dif- 
ferent type. And yet he was as fitted to his age and 
place as the others. He brought the best culture and 
experience of New England into the life of the Amer- 
ican metropolis. Great social and commercial forces 
were at work. New York was the gateway of the 
Western World and the nations poured through it. 
Her merchants had part in a world-wide commerce. 
Her citizens were compelled to think in terms of the 
race. Her churches faced all the forms of Christian- 
ity. The institutions of a Christian civilization were 
to be founded and developed. And the religious life 
was not to be self-centered and narrowly American 
but to be centrifugal to the uttermost parts of the 
earth. Dr. Storrs found his work in interpreting 
the best religious life of America, in connecting it 
with the past and directing the future into wise and 
stable progress. He did this as a pulpit teacher. This 
was his work, never to be estimated by followers or 
the size of popular congregations. He brought his 



i82 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

rich culture and broad sympathies to bear upon his 
task. His truth always had the great historical back- 
ground and yet always glorified the present meaning 
of life. He was the College preacher and the preacher 
for great occasions. He was to the pulpit what Ed- 
ward Everett and Theodore Winthrop were to the 
State. He was apologetic also in the largest sense. 
He commended Christianity to the modern mind. We 
have nothing in richness of material and splendor of 
argument to compare with his '' Divine Origin of 
Christianity indicated from its Historical Effects.'' 

You are familiar with the way he became an ex- 
temporaneous preacher. He had preached written ser- 
mons for twenty-five years, when the burning of his 
church, the use of an opera house, the need of meet- 
ing a changing congregation, threw him upon the face 
to face method, discovered his power, gave him new 
delight in his work, and made him the prince of ex- 
temporizers. He always partook of the older style. 
He was too elaborate and full for the modern mind. 
He lacked the nervous energy, the homely directness, 
the vivid and virile qualities of the best oral style. 
Except on special occasions he did not reach great 
masses of men. But he gave to his message a splen- 
dor of vision and of diction that commended the Gos* 
pel as the chief force in the higher life of men. 

There are a dozen names I should like to dwell upon 
in the same way, but the limit of this volume forbids. 
Three of four must be drawn with strokes enough to 
leave the figure of the man before us. There is Con- 
stans L. Goodell, who had two notable pastorates that 
covered the best part of the last half of the nineteenth 
century, first in New Britain, Connecticut, and then 
for a long term over the Pilgrim Church of St. Louis, 



SOME DISTINCTIVE CONTRIBUTIONS 183 

His life is full of suggestion and inspiration for every 
minister. 

He was providentially fitted to minister in a great 
western city. His ready adaptation, his quick and 
deep sympathies, his personal interest, his energy and 
courage and enthusiasms, his prescience and practical 
wisdom, his commanding figure and voice and leader- 
ship, his deep spirituality combined with humor and 
tolerance made his ministry one of remarkable inter- 
est and power. He was first of all a pastor, knowing 
men one by one and winning them through friendship. 
He had a genius for organization and had a work 
for each one and each one at work. He gave a wel- 
come to new forms of endeavor. He it was who wrote 
the beautiful introduction to '* Children and the 
Church,'' the first book of Dr. Frances E. Clarke, 
which started the movement of the Young People's So- 
cieties. His preaching was worthy, the expression of 
the great heart and a singular devotion, but in the ever 
changing, forming life of a western city it was the man 
that counted the most in his gifts of the friend and 
the leader. 

Another name not to be forgotten in the succession 
of Congregational preachers is that of Jacob M. Man- 
ning, pastor for twenty-five years of the Old South 
Church, Boston. His ministry covers the same years 
as that of Dr. Goodell. They must have been in An- 
dover together. A farmer boy from western New 
York, going to Amherst with the ministry in view, 
after leaving the Seminary he had a short pastorate 
at Medford, Massachusetts, then became assistant and 
soon full pastor of one of the most important churches 
of the country. The Old South had had a line of 
notable preachers and Dr. Manning kept up the sue- 



l84 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

cession. The country lad became one of the most 
thoughtful and finished preachers of the day. I use 
the word finished not in the sense of elaborate or un- 
duly polished, and so suggesting perhaps the artifi- 
cial. His sermons had the ring of conviction and 
reality. But they were finely wrought. They have 
the sense of proportion, the harmony of true beauty. 
They lack the original quality of his successor, Dr. 
Geo. A. Gordon. They have little of his fertility and 
exuberance, but they are marked by reality and sim- 
plicity, a high ideal of truth and of work. Professor 
Tyler^s words concerning him seem true to the very 
end. '* Made originally of precious metal, cast in a 
fine mold, he took on a finer polish at each successive 
stage of his education." There are few better vol- 
umes of American sermons than the one published after 
his death. 

Dr. William M. Taylor of the Broadway Tabernacle, 
New York City, was the most notable importation from 
Scotland to the American pulpit. With pastorates at 
Kilmarnock and Liverpool, he came to America in 
the maturity of his strength. He was a scholar in the 
pulpit and yet with unusual rhetorical gifts. He was 
a giant in body and mind, and a leader of men by 
sovereign right of intellectual and spiritual attain- 
ments. He gave us an example, sorely lacking, of 
systematic interpretation of Christian truth. He also 
taught us that great preaching came from great think- 
ing and great living. The noblest and widest litera- 
ture lived in his speech. His Bible portraits have not 
been surpassed in their vivid features and present mes- 
sage. Some of the sermons would seem too packed 
with thought and too rich in instance for the mercurial 



SOME DISTINCTIVE CONTRIBUTIONS 185 

spirit of cosmopolitan congregations, but his own pas- 
sion and person always made them vital. 

Among recent men stand the names of Dr. T. T. 
Hunger of New Haven, Dr. Amory Howe Bradford 
of Montclair, New Jersey, and Washington Gladden 
of Columbus, Ohio, All three were thinkers and lead- 
ers and their spoken word was vastly multiplied by 
their books. A bust of Dr. Bradford has recently been 
unveiled in the Montclair church, with this inscrip- 
tion : *' Inspiring preacher, sympathetic pastor, wise 
leader, public spirited citizen, founder of institutions, 
apostle of the divine fatherhood, prophet of the hu- 
man brotherhood, his memory will abide as inspira- 
tion and joy." 

If one should try to estimate the distinctive contri- 
bution of the Congregational pulpit, it would be in 
the intellectual aspects of truth. Its preachers have 
been essentially teachers. They have had the best 
training of New England and the traditions of that 
training have been carried westward. The sermons 
have been suggestive and apologetic, appealing to rea- 
son and conscience more than the emotions, and deal- 
ing with the practical, ethical aspects of truth. 

2 

The Baptist Pulpit 

The Baptist churches are marked for their strong 
individualism. They are the logical and extreme out- 
come of Protestantism. And American life has 
greatly emphasized this trait. Therefore it is the nat- 
ural result to find the Baptist Church the strongest 
numerically of American Protestants. 



l86 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

It is well to keep in mind the principles that have 
marked their development that we may understand 
their pulpit. 

As I have said they are the logical, product of the 
Reformation, i. e. authority of the word of God alone, 
salvation by faith alone and the supremacy of the 
individual conscience. Baptist views and churches 
early appeared and they have had an important place 
in nearly all Protestant countries. 

In the New Testament they found their concep- 
tion of the Church to be composed only of believers. 
The Church should be made up of regenerate persons. 
This meant adult persons. So they have restricted 
baptism and church membership to adults, and have 
rejected the covenant idea of life and infant baptism. 
As they accepted nothing that could not be proved 
by the Scripture, they have mostly held to immersion 
as taught there and as alone symbolical of the com- 
plete change of regeneration. 

This has made them logical opponents of the na- 
tional or State church which is founded upon the 
covenant principle of the social solidarity of the reli- 
gious life. This has also made them independent in 
their church life, and as conscience was free in in- 
terpreting the word of God, it has made them apostles 
of religious freedom, especially the free use of indi- 
vidual powers in instruction and leadership. 

Roger Williams stands at the very beginning of Bap- 
tist history in America, and is the most notable name 
in that history. 

The Puritans were reformers and in New England 
established what they held a Scriptural Church, but 
they had the national idea of the Mother Church, the 
Church was for the community and must be supported 



SOME DISTINCTIVE CONTRIBUTIONS 187 

by it. The Church was Congregational but it was 
estabhshed. New England was a theocracy. 

The Puritans came for freedom to worship God 
in their way, but all who voluntarily came with them 
must also worship in their way. And they were right 
up to their light. It seemed to them the only way to 
found a strong state. 

Roger Williams did not agree with the dominant 
idea. And there were a few others with him. He 
was a noble and pure man but he made it very uncom- 
fortable for the early colony. *' Learned, eloquent, 
sincere, generous, Roger Williams was a malignant 
independent. Separating himself not only from the 
English church, but from all who would not separate 
from it, and from all who would not separate from 
these, and so on, until he could no longer, for con- 
science' sake, hold fellowship with his wife in fam- 
ily prayers. After long patience the colonial govern- 
ment deemed it necessary to signify to him, that if 
his conscience would not suffer him to keep quiet, 
and refrain from stirring up sedition, and embroiling 
the colony with the English government, he would 
have to seek freedom for that sort of conscience out- 
side of their jurisdiction; and they put him out ac- 
cordingly, to the great advantage of both parties and 
without loss of mutual respect and love." ^ 

Roger Williams was a prophetic spirit in teaching 
that civil government had no concern to enforce ** the 
laws of the first table," and the colony of Rhode 
Island founded by him embodied the principle of 
'* Soul-liberty " in its earliest acts. 

The spirit of religious liberty and tolerance made 
rapid progress and soon Baptists ceased to be a pro- 

1 Bacon, " History of the American Churches," p. 100. 



l88 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

hibited form of religion in the Massachusetts colony. 
In the beginning of the eighteenth century three fore- 
most pastors of Boston assisted in the ordination of 
a minister to the Baptist Church, at which Cotton 
Mather preached the sermon, entitled, *' Good Men 
United." It was a frank confession of the ill things 
done in the name of religion. 

Many natural forces in the colonies tended to give 
the Baptist churches a rapid progress. Groups of 
settlers in many colonies, such as the German sects, 
the Mennonites and Moravians, people with the in- 
tense missionary spirit, were closely allied to the Bap- 
tists in their ideas. 

The great awakening in the middle of the eighteenth 
century marks the close of the distinctly Puritan sway 
and the growth of independent feeling and action in 
religion. The evangelists that carried on the work 
were often unordained men and the groups of people 
reached were without the instruction of ministers. 
They must develop their own institutions of religion, 
self-trained men called out of their number to be the 
leaders. This suited well the Baptist principle. And 
the growing spirit of freedom, and the scattered and 
isolated communities led to the spirit of independence 
in religion. Especially in the middle and southern col- 
onies did the Baptists have rapid growth. 

It can hardly be said that they have been noted for 
their pulpit until recent years. In the Colonial pe- 
riod and well into the nineteenth century many of their 
churches were served by devoted but untrained men. 
They were men of force but their lack of training 
prevented them from becoming eminent in the pulpit. 
Some of them were eflfective evangelists, like Elder 
Jacob Knapp, whose preaching quickened hundreds 



SOME DISTINCTIVE CONTRIBUTIONS 189 

of churches. The Baptist churches were noted for 
their fervent evangelism, and the growth of the 
churches developed too much upon special seasons and 
special preachers. 

One minister stands out from the rest for his long 
service, his thoughtful ministry and his wide service 
to the community. Dr. WiUiam Williams of New 
York was fifty years in one church, holding his own 
with strong men, large-minded in his interests, a per- 
suasive preacher, and a leader in the higher life of his 
city. It is natural that a church that at first had low 
educational standards for its pulpit, should awake at 
last to thorough training and so should have its most 
noted preachers in connection with its schools. 

The three noted names among the older men are all 
those of teachers. 

President Francis Wayland of Brown University 
gave that College its strong foundation and his books 
on moral philosophy were the text-books of a genera- 
tion. He was only second to Timothy Dwight as a 
preacher to College men. And the wonderful growth 
of the Baptist Church in education equaled by no 
other church is due in no small part to his contagious 
example. 

Dr. E. G. Robinson, first professor of theology at 
Rochester and later President of Brown University, 
had few equals in his day as a platform speaker. He 
had a subtle, sensitive nature that interpreted the com- 
mon thought, especially of critical hours, and a mag- 
netic personality that charmed and swayed a multi- 
tude by his thought. The older citizens of Rochester 
have never forgotten his impromptu speech at the 
assassination of Abraham Lincoln and speak of it as 
one of the great experiences of their lives. 



190 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

Dr. Broadus was the great preacher of the South 
and could have had any pulpit of his church, but surely 
he was right in putting his conception of thorough 
study and honest interpretation of the Gospel and 
simple, persuasive speech into generations of young 
men. His voice is multiplied a hundred times by the 
service he gave to the training of the ministry. 

Any view of the Baptist pulpit could hardly fail to 
mention George A. Lorimer, the actor-preacher who 
brought dramatic feeling and the most facile expres- 
sion to the giving of a Gospel always thoughtful and 
worthy; P. S. Henson, whose wit and imagination 
and original thought and manner added persuasion to 
his fearless and searching message; Wayland Hoyt, 
effective with pen and voice, untiring in energy, heard 
widely on platform and in pulpit, a stimulating exam- 
ple for the pulpit of his day. The standard of preach- 
ing in the Baptist pulpit has been immensely raised 
in fifty years. No Seminaries have more gifted teach- 
ers and no pulpit is receiving a larger number of well- 
equipped, enthusiastic preachers. 

The most distinctive contribution of the Baptist pul- 
pit is that of freedom of teaching. No pulpit is freer 
and no pulpit is more loyal to the truth. Each man 
is not only free to find his own truth and express it 
in his own way, but any man who has the gift and 
desire may do this. The Church has little to do with 
it all. There are few paths in which men are forced 
to walk. Freedom is not often abused, and an in- 
creasing number know that it means obedience to the 
highest use, and to use the best ways of fitting them- 
selves for their work. Freedom leads to self-reliance 
and courage and large sympathies. And with increas- 



SOME DISTINCTIVE CONTRIBUTIONS 191 

ing culture the Baptists are known for the generous 
manhood of their preachers. 



The Unitarian Pulpit 

The condition of the New England churches out 
of which Unitarianism arose as a distinct form is 
thus described by O. B. Frothingham, the biographer 
of Theodore Parker. '* The doctrines of the Puritan 
theology had lost their hold on an unimaginative peo- 
ple; and with them the fervors of the evangelical 
spirit had declined. The sinfulness of human nature, 
the need of redemption, the deity of Christ, the aton- 
ing efficacy of his blood, the necessity of inward re- 
newal by the grace of God, the worthlessness of mor- 
ality, the everlastingness of future punishment, the 
consciousness of acceptance, the immanence of Christ 
in the Church, the eternity of bliss for believers, were 
all more or less thoughtfully rejected by men whose 
sober lives had settled down into prose, and whose 
experience suggested little of mystery. The preach- 
ing lacked inspiration : even the prayers were didactic. 
The best of the clergy were men of letters, rarely 
prophets: the worst were neither. Churches were 
closed to Whitefield before Theodore Parker was born. 
The seats of culture dreaded the influence of the fa- 
mous preacher of revivals; the clergy encouraged the 
laity to frown down extravagant views ; the sacra- 
ments had lost their charm; the mystery had departed 
from the communion ; baptism was rarely adminis- 
tered; heads of families were commonly church mem- 
bers, the younger people seldom ; family prayers were 



192 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

infrequent ; grace before meat was unusual ; the clergy- 
man was respected as a man of education; the Sab- 
bath was observed punctually; the Bible was read; but 
the soul of the Protestant faith had fled." 

This was the natural, perhaps inevitable reaction, 
from a high, dogmatic theology that made hard and 
fast lines with all God's workings with a human soul, 
and yet left the common concerns of life so largely 
outside this working. It was also the result of the 
increased interest in this earthly life, due to all the 
growing knowledge of the world and human life and 
to the increased ministry of the world to the use and 
satisfactions of this life. And furthermore the crit- 
ical spirit born of the physical sciences had little by 
little permeated the common thoughts and made men 
either skeptical or indifferent to the former claims of 
the Church. 

But to say this is only a partial statement of the 
Unitarian movement. To the rank and file the doc- 
trine and experiences of evangelical religion were too 
high or unnatural and unreal. That was the result 
of a cold, practical reason. 

But there was more than this in the Unitarian move- 
ment. There were men who regarded it as the rein- 
terpretation of Christianity, as sloughing off the im- 
perfect philosophies of the centuries and getting back 
fto Christ. They believed themselves pioneers of a 
new, broader and more vital expression of faith. 
They had something of the spirit of the prophet. 

Theodore Parker was such a man. 

He partook of the revolutionary spirit, the revolt 
of the age against external authority in the State and 
the Church, against hard and fast and narrow bound- 
aries of the religious life. God and religion were not 



SOME DISTINCTIVE CONTRIBUTIONS 193 

to be confined. Beauty was a part of God's world and 
all high endeavor. And religion was to express itself 
in nature and art, in literature and science, in industry 
and government. It was a spirit and not a creed, a 
life and not a church. And he was steeped in the 
transcendental philosophy. Things were not what they 
seemed. And he was ever trying to get behind form 
to the simpler and deeper realities. So Theodore 
Parker was a disturbing but inspiring force in the 
Unitarian pulpit. He went to greater lengths of re- 
volt than Channing, because he had greater energy 
of life and greater courage of faith. 

He was a man of wonderful moral and religious 
sensibility. I think the story of his childhood is 
prophetic of his whole life. '* When a little boy in 
petticoats, in my fourth year, one fine day in spring 
my father led me by the hand to a distant part of the 
farm, but soon sent me home alone. On the way I 
had to pass a little pond hole, then spreading its wa- 
ters wide. A rhodora in full bloom attracted my at- 
tention and drew me to the spot. I saw a little spotted 
tortoise sunning himself in the shallow water at the 
root of the flaming shrub. I lifted the stick I had in 
my hand to strike the harmless reptile. But all at 
once something checked my little arm, and a voice 
within me said clear and loud, * It is wrong.' I held 
my uplifted stick in wonder at the new emotion — 
the consciousness of an involuntary but inward check 
upon my actions — till the tortoise and the rhodora 
both vanished from my sight. I hastened home, told 
the tale to my mother, and asked what it was that told 
me it was wrong. She wiped a tear from her eye with 
her apron, and taking me in her arms, said, ' Some men 
call it conscience; but I prefer to call it the voice of 



194 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

God in the soul of man. If you listen and obey it, 
then it will speak clearer and clearer, and always guide 
you right; but if you turn a deaf ear and disobey, 
then it will fade out little by little, and leave you all 
in the dark and without a guide. Your life depends 
on your heeding this little voice.' I am sure no event 
in my life has made so deep and lasting an impres- 
sion upon me." This sensibility of the child became 
the reflection of manhood and deepened into character. 
He was wonderfully sensitive to the appeal of weak- 
ness and suffering, and he brought the loftiest truth 
to the touch of the simplest need and failed not to 
speak for the helpless and wronged. 

This moral sensitiveness that made him like a sensi- 
tive plate to the faintest impress of truth and life, also 
made his own spirit the test and judge. The source 
of his faith was within. He was hospitable to all 
teachers, but called none master. He was a pure 
transcendentalist if there ever was one. His was an 
intuitive faith, seemingly unfed by the great historical 
facts of Christianity that most believers depend upon, 
and unassailable as well by historical doubt and lit- 
erary criticism. ** His beliefs were not imported : 
they were the native products of his own mind and 
experience. They were fact before they were formu- 
lated. As a boy, almost as a child, his sense of the 
reality, the immanence, the infinite perfection of God, 
had been profound; his assurance of the soul's per- 
sonal immortality was beyond necessity or reach of 
argument ; his reverence for the moral law, as voiced 
by his private conscience, was habitual and deep. He 
seems never to have doubted on these three points; 
and they were the cardinal points of his religious 
faith. To give expression to these three great verities, 



SOME DISTINCTIVE CONTRIBUTIONS 195 

to make them seen in their beauty, appreciated in their 
intrinsic value, and accepted as vital principles in pri- 
vate and public life, was his ruling passion/' 

This absolute trust in the moral nature of man was 
his strength and also his weakness. He was too inde- 
pendent of the great facts of religion and the conclu- 
sions of generations of faith. He said that Luther 
plunged out into the great deep, trusting the winds 
of God and the pilot of his soul, but his successors had 
timidly hugged the shores of truth that other men had 
found. The venture, the trust was the soul of Parker, 
and he thought to be a Luther of a new reformation 
of spiritual religion. 

He was the staunchest Protestant. He could not 
conform to the metes and bounds of his own church, 
and finally cast off all association of churches — per- 
haps was logically compelled to do so — and steered 
his course alone. In slipping his moorings and go- 
ing out into the open sea he beheved that he was go- 
ing into the deep sea of truth. 

With this staunch independence, this absolute trust 
in his own moral and spiritual discernment was a sym- 
pathy for life and hunger of mind and heart that 
made him the most omnivorous student of philosophies 
and sciences, of literature and religions and made his 
mind a curiosity shop as well as a treasury of truth. 
There is surely a touch of genius here, the avidity and 
eagerness and insatiableness of his mental life! 

We have nothing like it in the American pulpit, 
save the early student life of Phillips Brooks. In a 
single two months he read sixty-five volumes in Ger- 
man, English, Danish, Latin and Greek. He found 
delight in the lighter literature of fiction and poetry, 
he plowed his way through the great thinkers of the 



196 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

world. The range of his reading was practically uni- 
versal. 

And so he interpreted his ministry in a large way. 
All literature to him was sacred literature. All the 
facts of life were sacred, and he seemed to many in- 
tent upon things that did not make directly for the re- 
ligious life, and in his universality failed to emphasize 
the essentials of Christianity. 

But he was a spiritual man : a fearless and inspiring 
preacher of what he held to be the Christian religion. 

Let me make this man speak in some of his most 
significant words. 

He prayed on entering the ministry : " I ask for 
thy blessings, O most merciful Father! upon all my 
labors and studies. Keep me from sin and from every 
harmful error." 

The devotion to his work was strong and sincere. 
" Consequences I have nothing to do with : they be- 
long to God. He will take care of all consequences. 
To me belongs only duty. Come what will come, I 
shall do it. All that I have, give I to the one cause, 
be it little or much." 

And the supreme aim was the spiritual life of his 
hearers. ** If I deemed it certain that any word of 
mine would ever waken the deep inner life of another 
soul, I should bless God that I am alive and speak- 
ing. But I will trust. I am sometimes praised for 
my sermons. I wish men knew how cold those sleek 
speeches are. I would rather see one man practicing 
one of my sermons than hear all men praise them." 

He was not flattered by the crowds that hung upon 
his ministry. ** Nothing makes a real man so humble 
as to stand and speak to many men." His ethical pas- 
sion is shown in his prophet-like teaching of the social 



SOME DISTINCTIVE CONTRIBUTIONS 197 

mission of the true church. '' In the midst of all 
these wrongs and sins, amid popular ignorance, pauper- 
ism, crime and war, and slavery too, is the Church to 
say nothing, do nothing, nothing for the good of such 
as feel the wrong, nothing to save them who do the 
wrong? If I thought so, I would never enter the 
Church but once again, and then to bow my shoulder 
to their manliest work — to heave down its strong 
pillars, arch and dome and roof and wall, steeple and 
towers, though, like Samson, I buried myself under 
the ruins of that temple which profaned the worship 
of God most high, of God most loved. I would do 
this in the name of man ; in the name of Christ I would 
do it; yes, in the dear and blessed name of God." 

Theodore Parker held his audiences by the worth 
of his thought. He was a thinker and taxed the 
thought of his hearers. He read his sermons and 
there was nothing practically attractive in voice or 
person or manner. " His audiences were held by the 
spell of earnest thought alone, uttered in language so 
simple, that a plain man hearing him, remarked on 
leaving church, 'Is that Theodore Parker? You told 
me he was a remarkable man ; but I understood every 
word he said.' His style was never dry; the words 
were sinewy; the sentences short and pithy; the lan- 
guage was fragrant with the odor of fields, and rich 
with the juices of the ground. Passages of exquisite 
beauty bloomed on almost every page. Illustrations 
pertinent and racy abounded ; but there was no ambi- 
tious flight of rhetoric, and never any attempt to carry 
the heart in opposition to the judgment." 

He was not so finely endowed as Channing but he 
had a braver spirit. He was the prophet of the un- 
churched but religious masses: he was a man of the 



198 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

people whose *' word ran swiftly in rough paths.'' 

His real message was ethical, the social application 
of truth. And here he was the least negative. How- 
ever radical and searching the word, it had the ideal 
of Jesus to enforce its claim. 

** His commanding merit of a reformer is this, that 
he insisted beyond all men in pulpits — I cannot think 
of one rival — that the essence of Christianity is its 
practical morals: it is there for use, or it is nothing; 
and if you combine it with sharp trading, or with 
ordinary city ambitions to gloss over municipal cor- 
ruptions, or private intemperance, or successful fraud, 
or immoral politics, or unjust wars, or the cheating 
of Indians, or the robbery of frontier nations, or 
leaving your principles at home to show on the high 
seas or in Europe a supple compliance to tyrants, it 
is an hypocrisy, and the truth is not in you; and no 
love of religious music, or of dreams of Swedenborg, 
or praise of John Wesley or of Jeremy Taylor can 
save you from the Satan which you are." ^ 

Theodore Parker was classed as a radical Unitarian 
and often gave short shrift to what he termed orthodox 
superstitions. No doubt he was too ready to apply 
his rule of thumb to the agonies and ecstasies of 
Prophet and Apostle. 

But his reverence for Jesus and his moral allegiance 
might well be the spirit of us all. His heart speaks 
in his beautiful sonnet : 

O thou great friend to all the sons of men, 
Who once appeared in humblest guise below 
Sin to rebuke, to break the Captive's chain, 
To call thy brethren forth from want and woe! 

i*'Life," by O. B, Frothingham, p. 551. 



SOME DISTINCTIVE CONTRIBUTIONS 199 

Thee would I sing. Thy truth is still the light 

Which guides the nations groping on their way, 

Stumbling and falling in disastrous night, 

Yet hoping ever for the perfect day, 

Yes, thou art still the life; thou art the way 

The holiest know — light, life and way of heaven; 

And they who dearest hope and deepest pray 

Toil by the truth, life, way, that thou hast given; 

And in thy name aspiring mortals trust 

To uplift their bleeding brothers rescued from the dust. 

Next to Channing, Theodore Parker is the shining 
name of the Unitarian pulpit. But there were lesser 
lights that shone with a clear and steady radiance. 
They were all affected by the Cambridge group of 
literary men, Emerson, Longfellow, Motley, Ticknor, 
Holmes and Lowell. They were all seeking for the 
voices of God outside the Bible and seeking to widen 
the sphere of religion. They all regarded literature 
as the highest interpretation of life and religion, as 
the life inspired by God in its human relations. 

James Freeman Qarke, like the elder Peabody, was 
a Unitarian of the older school; of the type of Chan- 
ning rather than Parker, whose position in many ways 
would be hard to distinguish from the liberal ortho- 
doxy of to-day. Take this phrase in the criticism of 
a recent book — *' A Christ who is a manifestation of 
God in humanity for a Christ who is a God-man, and 
therefore neither a manifestation of what God is nor 
of what man can hope to become.'' Such an interpre- 
tation of Christ as emphasizes his Divinity rather than 
his Deity is the spirit of the more reverent of the 
early Unitarians. Dr. Clarke was an active pastor 
in Boston for most of his Hfe, a teacher and leader, 
a citizen first of all, eager to have a hand in what- 



200 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

ever might contribute to the higher life of his city 
and the nation, but particularly devoted to ministering 
to the broad but genuine religious life of his church. 
He is best known for his studies in comparative reli- 
gion. His '' Ten Great Rehgions " is perhaps the 
first notable American book in that increasing eflfort 
to understand the religious nature and aspiration of 
the race and regards the ethnic faiths, not as inven- 
tions of Satan, but as " broken lights," ** lame hands 
of faith " calling to Him who is Lord of all. 

Edward Everett Hale is the granite of New Eng- 
land covered with mosses and lichens from which 
flows a spring of pure water giving growth and 
beauty along its course. He was the intimate friend 
and companion of our chief literary men, a constant 
writer for the Atlantic and the North American, bet- 
ter known for his short stories such as '' A man with- 
out a Country " and *' In His Name " than for his 
sermons, who has given us some of our very best 
sketches of the men and events of our early national 
life. But he was an efifective preacher. He was a 
figure of the national pulpit. His heavy eyebrows 
and his shaggy head gave him a certain leonine appear- 
ance. And it was expressive of the mind and spirit 
within. He was strong and tenacious of convictions, 
somewhat dogmatic and belligerent, but as so often 
happens with such rugged natures, a tender heart and 
a desire to help that was the ruling spirit of his life. 
Few pulpits have been so openly and efifectively con- 
nected with the practical efforts of Christian philan- 
thropy and reform as that of Edward Everett Hale. 

James A. Bartol had a striking physical likeness to 
Dr. Hale, but was thoroughly original as man and 
preacher. He was classmate at Bowdoin and life- 



SOME DISTINCTIVE CONTRIBUTIONS 20I 

long friend of Dr. Cyrus Hamlin, the great mission- 
ary to Turkey. And that two men so positive and 
so unlike in their theological position should always 
be friends is a large working of charity. That Dr. 
Bartol and Horace Bushnell should be brought to- 
gether in intellectual and spiritual sympathy is not 
such a wonder, but that he should rejoice in the work 
of Father Taylor of the Sailor's Bethel speaks large 
things for his Christian spirit. Dr. Bartol had a bold 
imagination, a fiery spirit, a vivid, epigrammatic style, 
and spoke of Christian duty with arresting and per- 
suasive force. 

I will speak of one other Unitarian preacher only 
recently passing from us. 

Robert Collyer is unlike the others in that he is not 
a New Englander, not trained in the literary and 
philosophical atmosphere of other leaders, not at all 
noted as a writer. A preacher by gifts and single- 
ness of devotion, one of the most picturesque figures 
in the American pulpit. "If Daniel Webster had 
lived beyond his allotment of threescore years and ten, 
he might have looked very much as the Rev. Dr. Rob- 
ert Collyer did yesterday on the eve of his eighty- 
eighth birthday. Robert Collyer was a blacksmith, ap- 
prentice and journeyman; for twenty-one years before 
he took a church, he hammered hot iron into shape 
preparatory to molding souls, and the massive shoul- 
ders, deep chest and great, thick hands still bear elo- 
quent evidence of those early manual triumphs." 

Robert Collyer came to this country as a workman 
from England and a Methodist lay preacher. He was 
trained in the school of life. He had a passion for 
righteousness. His soul abhorred oppression of every 
kind. And when the Methodist Bishops forbade his 



202 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

fiery utterances against slavery, his natural freedom 
and humanity turned to the pulpit that was then the 
freest in its utterances. He was the pioneer Unitarian 
preacher of Chicago and organized Unity Church, 
which has had a line of gifted preachers. From Chi- 
cago he came to New York as successor of Dr. Bel- 
lows in the Church of the Messiah, of which he was 
so long a pastor and one of the leading figures of the 
metropolis. I have never heard Dr. Collyer preach, 
but I have heard him pray at the installation of one 
of our young men over a Congregational church. A 
more child-like, vital and catholic prayer I never heard. 
Every devout heart would have to respond to it. He 
was loved by all who knew him. He was recognized as 
an eloquent interpreter of the religious nature of man. 

The Unitarian pulpit has had an influence out of 
all proportion to its members. It has softened and 
modified the dogmatic spirit, made preaching less spec- 
ulative and more practical, increased the humanness 
of the sermon; in dwelling more on the interpretation 
of life, the religious nature and expression of men, 
it has made the style of the sermon less a separate 
language of religion and more in harmony with the 
best speech of men everywhere; and as it regards all 
life and its forms of art as full of God, it has greatly 
widened the material and subjects of preaching, but 
sometimes no doubt losing the direction and flow of 
message in the very richness of material. 

Their own best men, now that the smoke of contro- 
versy has cleared, will be ready to admit that their 
champions, in days of more acute sectarian strife, dis- 
played rigor in their work of rebuttal difficult to recon- 
cile with the doctrines of ''sweetness and light" that 
they were defending. Even so, theirs has been no 
mean contribution to the American pulpit. 



SOME DISTINCTIVE CONTRIBUTIONS 203 



The Methodist Pulpit 

The first service of John Wesley was as a mission- 
ary to the colony of Georgia. It was his contact with 
the Moravians in America that powerfully changed 
his vision and life and made him a prophetic voice to 
the formal and critical and selfish religion of the 
eighteenth century England and the call of Christian 
manhood to its degraded and hopeless masses. No 
doubt Mr. Augustine Birrell is right in calling John 
Wesley, judged by the effects of his life, the greatest 
Englishman of the eighteenth century. He was loyal 
to the Church of England. He had no idea of form- 
ing a separate church. His preachers were lay preach- 
ers. It has some correspondences to the laymen's 
movement to-day, only then it was despised and op- 
posed by the authorities of the Church. 

These fervent lay preachers, often men of scant 
education but consuming zeal, soon came to the Amer- 
ican colonies. At first they formed no churches and 
baptized no converts, but tried to bring the converts 
into the parish church. 

The most notable name of the early Methodist 
Church in America was Francis Asbury. He came 
to Philadelphia in 177 1 as a lay preacher. There were 
perhaps three hundred Methodist converts scattered 
about New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, but 
no organized churches. Without special training, he 
had used his gifts of speaking in England, and in 
America constantly trained himself in his work. At 
the beginning of the Revolution the majority of the 
Methodist preachers like their brethren of the Church 



204 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

of England were out of sympathy with the colonists 
and returned to the Mother Country. Asbury, demo- 
cratic in his feelings, kept his place, and tried almost 
alone to sustain the life of the converts through the 
long days of the Revolution. When peace came and 
a separate national life began, Wesley felt that the 
time had come for a separate independent church in 
America and the first Methodist Church was organ- 
ized in Baltimore in 1784. Asbury, who had been a 
lay superintendent of missions, was the first Bishop 
ordained in America. Ceaseless and fearless in his 
efforts, he covered his circuit from northern New 
England to the Carolinas and pushed over the AUe- 
ghenies, seeking the scattered people in the wilderness 
beyond. No doubt he spoke a fiery evangel. The 
very rudeness of the times gave emphasis and urgency 
to his word. And Bishop Asbury helped to make 
Methodism the very symbol for the pioneer preacher. 
If one should ask for the name of the typical cir- 
cuit-rider of frontier states, Peter Cartwright would 
have that name beyond all others. Such a man Ed- 
ward Eggleston has put into his novel, ** The Circuit 
Rider." He was a preacher for seventy years and 
for fifty he was the presiding elder of the Illinois dis- 
trict. The state was sown thick with stories of his 
shrewdness, his wit and his courage. The old settlers 
of the state, now very few, are as fond of telling rich 
and racy stories of Peter Cartwright as of Abraham 
Lincoln. In fact they had much in common, and 
sometimes crossed vei^bal swords. Cartwright was 
once defeated for Congress by Lincoln. He was noted 
for his knowledge of men, for the shrewd but kindly 
insight into the very heart. His reading of the secret 
life of men, like the insight of Spurgeon, was almost 



SOME DISTINCTIVE CONTRIBUTIONS 205 

uncanny. And he had a wit that could laugh away 
opposition and put the crowd in the happiest humor 
for his preaching — broad sunshine on the landscape 
making it fertile, for the good seed sown in it; or 
like the sharp blade of conscience opening the life and 
subduing men in terror of the revelation. He had a 
physical energy that plow^ed its way through all diffi- 
culties of man or nature, a rough and ready speech 
and manner that was fitted to his backwoods audiences, 
and yet at the same time won the reverence of men. 
He was the master of camp meetings, and if he failed 
to subdue the rough element gathered there with his 
tongue, he was not afraid to use his strong hand. 
His frank, free, homely style is indicated by the 
following extract from a conference speech against a 
Bishop holding slaves. *' It's all humbug that if a 
man inherits the slaves he can do nothing with them. 
I so became the owner and shouldered my responsi- 
bility, resolved to be like Caesar's wife, above suspi- 
cion, took them to my State, set them free, gave them 
land and built them a house, and they made more 
money than ever I did by preaching. Talk of divi- 
sion! I hope we shall hear no more of this sickly 
talk. I do not believe in a division and have not 
from the first. Why! this Methodist Episcopal 
church would not miss me any more than an ox would 
miss a fly ofif his horn." 

Until recent years \the majority of the Methodist 
ministry have been uneducated men. The Church has 
ministered to the neglected and the ignorant, it has 
been driven by the spirit of fervent evangelism to 
conquer the multitudes, and it has not been able to 
provide well trained men for its rapidly multiplying 
congregations. It has often been afraid of the schools 



2o6 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

as though culture would take the heart and power out 
of its preaching. Its method has called out men of 
native gifts of persuasion and leadership, and they 
have often gained the secrets of popular appeal. No 
doubt they have spoken best to their own people. But 
with the growth of general intelligence and refinement, 
men have been demanded who could speak to all men, 
not to a class. Such men have usually had the dis- 
cipline of the schools. The Methodist Church has not 
been slow to make suitable provision for the training 
of its preachers. And so it is natural that the men 
who stand out from their fellows should be so largely 
connected with the schools. 

Stephen Olin and Bishop Simpson are examples of 
their best preachers. 

Stephen Olin was the first President of Wesleyan 
University, and was an inspiring example to the men 
of his day in person and message. He declined to 
be a Bishop, preferring the large service of teacher 
and preacher. He was a man of giant frame and his 
mind had some kinship with his body. His command- 
ing presence, his noble character, his rich thought, his 
logical argument and fiery feeling — logic on fire — 
the definition of eloquence, made him for the time the 
leader of the Methodist people. 

But the prince of Methodist preachers for the last 
half of the nineteenth century was Bishop Mathew 
Simpson. He began as a doctor, and this experience 
gave him his insight into human need, his human in- 
terest and his pictorial power, as the medical studies 
helped Guthrie. He passed down the whole line of 
work and influence in his own church, preacher, col- 
lege professor, editor, bishop, president of the Theo- 
logical Seminary. He was a staunch friend of Lin- 



SOME DISTINCTIVE CONTRIBUTIONS 207 

coin and of great service to the Union by his sermons 
and speeches. Bishop Simpson, Hke all the others, 
was an extemporaneous preacher. He had as much 
of the platform and the stump as the pulpit. His chief 
thought in it all was the winning of men. Much of 
the divine fire has gone out of the sermons as they 
have out of the speeches of Henry Clay. Phillips 
Brooks' saying that *' a sermon that is good to read 
is not good to hear " was truer of Bishop Simpson 
than of himself. A certain fullness of style, a repe- 
tition for all kinds of people, the chaff with the oats 
without which says Th. Fuller the horse will bolt 
his meal mark the sermons, and prevent them from 
the interest of more artistic work. 

He is the first Methodist who gave the lectures on 
Preaching at Yale and the only one until Bishop Mc- 
Dowell in recent years. A single page on the power 
of preaching will give some idea of the variety, the 
sweep, the swing and fervor of the man. 

'* The long line of preachers extends in unbroken 
succession from Christ himself to the present hour. 
A line, did I say? More than a line, a pyramid of 
which he is the apex, to which each succeeding year, 
rises in altitude and widens in its base, and will rise 
and will widen, until it covers all lands, and the living 
preacher shall be seen and heard by every child of 
Adam on the globe. It is an unbroken succession, 
not by the ordinations of men, nor by the hands of 
men, nor by the will of men, but by the power of the 
Holy Spirit. It is a holy fellowship, a glorious asso- 
ciation. It has had its spots. All have been men of 
like passions with us. Some entered the ministry 
without a divine call; others have been overborne by 
passion. Some ' concerning the faith have madQ ^hip- 



208 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

wreck, of whom were Hymaneus and Alexander,' 
' Demas hath forsaken me, having loved this present 
world.' Peter denied his master, and Judas betrayed 
him. Men have disgraced themselves, and brought 
reproach upon the office ; but it still lives and strength- 
ens, because Christ lives with it, and has determined 
that it shall stand. He walks among the candlesticks 
and holds the stars in his right hand." ^ 

It is not my purpose in this volume to speak par- 
ticularly of living preachers. But ^the names of Bishop 
Vincent, Bishop Quale and Bishop McDowell and 
Bishop McConnell tell us that the old-time fervor and 
popular sympathy have not been lost but tempered 
and disciplined to newer conditions. 

What has been the special contribution of the Meth- 
odists to the American pulpit? 

Evangelical zeal and fervor, faith in the Gospel to 
reach the downmost man, the use of testimony, the 
witness to the ministry of special gifts, the power of 
emotion in religion, of enthusiasm in preaching. 



The Episcopal Pulpit 

It would no longer be said of the American Epis- 
copal Church as in the old days of polemical bitter- 
ness that it was a '' worldly church and an inferior 
pulpit." It was not true even then, but it had enough 
truth to give the saying sting and wide currency. 

The Episcopal Church as a whole has never been 
noted for its pulpit. A few gifted men in recent years 
have given a glory to their church and a noble impetus 

1 " Lectures on Preaching," p. 35. 



SOME DISTINCTIVE CONTRIBUTIONS 209 

to preaching. But we naturally look for the power of 
the pulpit in a freer church, where preaching is exalted 
and the preacher is made to feel his opportunity. 
" Emphasis upon liturgy," says Canon Hensley Hen- 
son of Westminster, " is not conducive to effective 
preaching.'' And then he explains that the develop- 
ment of ritual limits the thought and opportunity of 
preaching, and trains that habit of mind, attention to 
form and organization, opposed to the largeness of 
thought and feeling essential to strong preaching. 
Historically it is true that as organization has de- 
veloped and ritual has increased, the pulpit has de- 
clined. So Dr. McConnell, one of the preachers of 
the Episcopal Church, has said in one of their Con- 
gresses, and with great earnestness : *' We need more 
prophets, and not more priests." 

The Episcopal Church had a hard time until after 
the Revolution. It was a small and feeble minority 
in New England, and though it was in the majority 
in Virginia and had the influence of royal governors 
in Virginia and New York, it was poorly served. 
Clergymen were often sent to the colonies who had 
broken down at home; the younger brothers of noble- 
men, men who left their country for their country's 
good, brought their " soiled cassocks " into the colon- 
ies, to use the phrase of Thackeray. There were good 
men, apostolic men, here and there, who kept the 
spark of religion alive in the hostile conditions of 
pioneer life, but the rank and file were of no help to 
the Church. 

The churches were separate, without general organ- 
ization, with no Bishops, missions of the Mother 
Church, and of little concern to the men in authority. 
When James Blair, the founder of William and Mary 



2IO THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

College, urged on the Treasury Commissioner, Sir 
Edward Seymour, that such an institution was needed 
for training up clergymen, saying: '" you must not for- 
get that people in Virginia have souls to save as well 
as people in England," " Souls ! '* cried Seymour, 
with an oath, ** grow tobacco ! " 

So during the colonial days the Episcopal pulpit 
had a slow and precarious growth and during the 
Revolution it was almost blotted out, many of its 
clergymen returning to England and its members be- 
ing so largely loyalists. 

It may be said of our pulpit as of our literature, 
that there must be the growth of a national life and 
the consciousness of that life before there can be the 
distinctive and fitting expression of that life. Even 
the colonial pulpit of the Congregational Church ex- 
pressed its distinctively American life. Its earliest 
preachers, Oxford and Cambridge men as they were, 
were men of originality and freedom. Without dis- 
loyalty to their traditions, they were in the New World 
for the " liberty of prophesying," and guided only by 
their Bible, and their scholarly training, they voiced 
in their own way the needs of the Church in the wil- 
derness. So there was an American pulpit even be- 
fore there was an American nation. 

But the Episcopal Church did not partake of this 
spirit. The scattered churches were dependent upon 
the established Church of England and the preachers 
were poor copies of the men at home. There was no 
American Church and no American pulpit. It has 
been truly said that the Episcopal Church in its be- 
ginnings " was handicapped with a dead-weight of 
supercilious and odious Toryism." Here and there a 
man like Samuel Johnson, the tutor at Yale who be- 



SOME DISTINCTIVE CONTRIBUTIONS 211 

came the first President of King's College, New York, 
was led by his temperament and experience to seek 
a church that expressed the succession and organic 
nature of Christianity, and proved that it was pos- 
sible to be an Episcopal minister and at the same time 
a distinctive and loyal American. 

The refusal of England to grant an Episcopate to 
the colonies has often been lamented. Perhaps the 
refusal was a blessing in disguise, for what sort of a 
Bishop would have been sent by a minister like Sir 
Robert Walpole! 

But the Episcopal churches revived after the Revo- 
lution and feeling the new national life elected Bish- 
ops of their own. At first refused ordination by the 
English Bishops, sulky over the overwhelming defeat 
of the British arms. Bishop Seabury of Connecticut 
was ordained by the independent Episcopal Church of 
Scotland, and White of Pennsylvania and Prevost of 
New York soon after by the Archbishop of Canter- 
bury. Thus organized the American Episcopal Church 
started upon a career of growing numbers and worth 
and influence. 

The first preacher of the Episcopal Church of na- 
tional and even international reputation was Bishop 
Mcllvaine of Ohio. 

Charles Pettit Mcllvaine was of Scotch descent, of 
a family distinguished in the Revolution and in the 
early public life of the nation, educated at Princeton 
College and Seminary (there was then no Seminary 
in his own church), first rector of a church in Wash- 
ington, then Chaplain at West Point, afterwards rec- 
tor of St. Ann's, Brooklyn, from whence he was elected 
the Bishop of Ohio, and served forty years, the best 
known and best loved of all American Bishops until 



212 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

Phillips Brooks of our own day. He was converted 
at Princeton during a season of genuine revival and 
never lost the mark and spirit of that evangelical 
experience. Writing about it long afterwards he 
says : '' It is more than fifty years since I first wit- 
nessed a revival of religion. It was in the College 
of which I was a student. It was powerful and pre- 
vailing, and fruitful in the conversion of young men 
to God; and it was quiet, unexcited, and entirely free 
from all devices or means, beyond the few and simple 
which God has appointed, prayer and the ministry of 
the word. In that precious season of the power of 
God, my religious life began. I had heard before: 
I began then to know." 

His preaching always had the aim and the fervor of 
the evangelist. At West Point he first met the cold 
indifference or the bitter opposition of officers and 
cadets, but at last his word reached the conscience. 
Men came to him one by one under the power of con- 
viction an,d the whole place was moved, the fruits re- 
markable in devoted Christian lives, both in the army 
and in the ministry. Bishop Lee of Delaware, his 
life-long friend, has given the picture of the man and 
the preacher : ** As a preacher, his fine person, grace- 
ful manner and elocution, fervent and forcible style, 
commanded general admiration, and rendered his min- 
istrations very attractive and acceptable. The phys- 
ical man corresponded well with the intellectual, and 
the lovers of oratory found his discourses a rich treat. 
But they were invested with a power and a charm 
far exceeding aught conferred by the gifts of nature 
or the fruits of culture. His aim was not to gratify 
the ear and gratify the tastes but to arouse the con- 
science and convert the heart. The secret of his sue- 



SOME DISTINCTIVE CONTRIBUTIONS 213 

cess was that he preached with unwonted fervor and 
faithfulness the unsearchable riches of Christ. He 
spoke as one absorbed and penetrated with his sub- 
lime and awful subject. His ministry was clothed with 
power because it was full of reality and unction — 
met the wants of awakened souls — answered great 
questions stirring in the depths of troubled hearts, 
and pointed out clearly and distinctly the way of 
life." 

When rector in Washington, he had many public 
men in his church, among them Mr. Canning, the 
English minister and one of the great Parliamentary 
speakers of his day. Mr. Mcllvaine was trying to 
become an extemporaneous preacher, and then wrote 
his sermons in full or in part and then memorized 
them. Mr. Canning took great interest in the young 
preacher and one day said to him : *' Young man, you 
never will succeed if you go on in this way. Pre- 
pare your thoughts, have a distinct idea of what you 
mean to convey to your hearers ; and then leave the 
words to come of themselves." Mr. Mcllvaine acted 
upon this advice and became one of the most powerful 
extempore preachers of his day. 

Bishop Mcllvaine was almost as well known in Eng- 
land as in America, preached both at St. Paul's and 
Westminster Abbey and was honored by both the great 
Universities. He was the spiritual child of Charles 
Simeon, the great evangelical preacher of Cambridge, 
even as Alexander Duff was and he was the first 
American to be thus honored by the English Uni- 
versities. At the time of our civil war he went to 
England on a peace mission. He did not have Henry 
Ward Beecher's genius and daring to face an angry 
mob and subdue them by his speech, but he was no 



214 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

less effective in winning the attention of the EngHsh 
Church, the most critical towards the hopes of demo- 
cratic America. 

Bishop Mcllvaine died in Italy and his body rested 
for a time in Westminster Abbey, where a memorial 
service was held. Of this event the Archbishop of 
Canterbury wrote : " As he preached in St. Paul's, 
so I rejoice that he will rest, though it be only for a 
time, in the great Abbey, where so many of the illus- 
trious dead lie waiting for the resurrection, whom, in 
common with his countrymen, he rejoiced while liv- 
ing to reckon as brethren of the same blood. Few 
even living have done so much to draw England and 
the United States together." 

Dr. Alexander H. Vinton, twice pastor in Boston 
and once in Philadelphia, was a notable figure in him- 
self, and deserves further mention as the early pastor 
and example of Phillips Brooks, and later his friend 
and trusted counselor. 

*' In 1842, when Dr. Vinton became the rector of 
St. Paul's in Boston, Phillips Brooks was six years 
old, and from that time until he graduated from Har- 
vard College and entered upon the preparation for 
the ministry, he was under the influence of this strong 
personality. Dr. Vinton had a majestic appearance 
in the pulpit, the physical basis for oratory. His voice 
corresponded with his appearance, strong, rich and 
full. As an imposing and manly representative of the 
clerical profession, he was imaged in bronze upon the 
Soldiers' Monument on Boston Common, in the act 
of blessing the troops on their departure for the war. 
He was of the evangelical school, enforcing the atone- 
ment of Christ and the supreme doctrine of the Gospel 
of deliverance, urging also an inward conversion as 



SOME DISTINCTIVE CONTRIBUTIONS 215 

the condition of its acceptance. He had the evangel- 
ical conception of the pastor's office. It was to him a 
great ideal, which he had left the medical profession 
in order to serve." 

After the death of Dr. Vinton, Phillips Brooks 
preached a memorial sermon in which he described 
the pastoral office, as embodied in Dr. Vinton, with 
rare insight and beauty.^ ** I stop a moment and think 
of that great pastorship, of all it meant to countless 
souls; and to have lived in it and carried it on as he 
did seems to me to be an indescribable, an inestimable 
privilege. A great pastorship is the noblest picture of 
human influence and of relationship of man to man 
which the world has to show. It is the canonization 
of friendship. It is friendship lifted above the re- 
gions of mere instinct and sentiment and fondness, 
above all thoughts of policy or convenience, and ex- 
alted into the mutual helpfulness of the children of 
God. The pastor is father and brother both to those 
whose deepest lives he helps in deepest ways. His 
belonging to his people is like the broad spreading of 
the sky over the lives of men and women and little 
children, of good and bad, of weak and strong, on all 
of whom alike it sheds its rain and dew. Who that 
has ever known such a pastorate can believe that 
death, which sets free all the best and purest things 
into a larger spiritual being, ends the relationship of 
soul to soul which a true pastorship involves ? " 

Dr. Stephen H. Tyng of New York was another 
fervent evangelist, loyal to his church, but more de- 
voted to preaching than to liturgy or organization. 
He was rector of St. George's ; and in the early years 
gave that church the aggressive, missionary spirit, that 

1 " Life of Brooks," i : 45. 



2l6 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

ministry to present need and surrounding life that has 
been developed through the years since and has made 
St. George's one of the best expressions of practical 
Christianity. Dr. Tyng was an effective platform 
speaker as well as preacher. He used evangelical 
methods in his church, he was a fervent advocate of 
the practical reforms of the day. He was catholic in 
his sympathies and promoted inter-church agencies, 
such as the Bible Society and the Evangelical Alliance. 
He was a force for a more united and aggressive 
Christianity. 

Dr. Richard Newton of Philadelphia was the prince 
of children's preachers. He carried out the theory 
of the Episcopal Church, that children were to be 
trained as Christians and into active membership of 
the Church. Before the Sunday School had been fully 
organized and had so largely filled the place of home 
and pulpit instruction. Dr. Newton gathered the chil- 
dren of the congregation and taught and trained them 
by worship and preaching. Six volumes of the chil- 
dren's sermons have been published. And they have 
not been surpassed by more recent books. In the 
choice and adaptation of truth for a child's mind, in 
the careful discussion of this truth, in the wealth of 
Bible stories and illustrations and the heroic stories 
of modern life that especially appeal to boys. Dr. 
Newton is a fine example of the preacher to youth. 

Bishop Arthur Cleveland Coxe is a different type 
from the rest. The son of Dr. Hanson Cox, a leader 
of the Presbyterian Church, and for a short time a 
Professor in Auburn Seminary, and so brought up 
as a distinct evangelical, the son felt the influences 
of the Oxford Movement and became a High church- 
man. He was the most effective preacher of this type, 



SOME DISTINCTIVE CONTRIBUTIONS 217 

one of the few of this class that was preeminently a 
preacher. No doubt the example of his father and 
his Presbyterian training with his native gifts kept 
him from depreciating the place and power of preach- 
ing. He was a poet and wrote many hymns, one at 
least, ''Oh! where are Kings and Empires now," 
seems destined to be sung as long as men use music 
in worship. He had the artistic and historic spirit, 
he loved beauty, and historic places, and the stately 
memorials of the past, and he was fitted to give a 
young and struggling church in a new land the sense 
of historic continuity, and to try to maintain in the 
growth of forms the essentials of the religious life. 
By his controversial addresses, his essays and poems 
and sermons. Bishop Coxe did much to shape the 
Episcopal Church into the expanding Hfe of the na- 
tion. 

Did the plan permit, it would be a pleasure to dwell 
upon living preachers who give distinction to the 
Episcopal pulpit. They are second to none, espe- 
cially men in the Episcopate. Some of them have a 
prophetic quality and are a fearless, effective voice 
to the social conscience of our day. 

The distinctive contribution of the Episcopal Church 
to the American Pulpit has been in the influence of 
worship upon the sermon and in modifying an undue 
individualism through the historic and social spirit. 
The strength and weakness of the American pulpit 
has been its extreme individualism. The Oxford 
Movement emphasized the social forces of religion: 
it bound men together and to the past. It appealed to 
imagination and historic association. It taught us 
that religion was a world of beauty, that worship must 
be in keeping with the highest views of God, and 



2l8 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

that preaching must nourish the roots of reverence 
in the soul, and make men feel the continuity of faith 
and the unity of true religion. 



The Presbyterian Pulpit 

Two streams of influence have united to form the 
Presbyterian Church of the United States, the Puritans 
of New England and the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians 
of the Middle Colonies. There have been lesser tribu- 
taries such as the Huguenots of New York and the 
Carolinas, and the German Reformed of Pennsylvania. 
But the chief forces are Puritan and Scotch. And 
they have given the Presbyterian pulpit distinctive 
qualities and a worthy history. The Puritans brought 
their purifying zeal and independence and the Scotch 
their reverence for great names and their interest in 
Creed and Church. And both were greatly modified 
by the life and demands of the New World. The 
Puritans felt the need of association, the advantages of 
a stronger form of church government, as they pushed 
westward into scattered settlements, and easily adopted 
the Presbyterian form of church life. The Scotch- 
Irish broke through their reserve, they gained ready 
adaptation to new conditions, the natural fervor of the 
race flamed out to meet the religious indifference and 
neglect, the moral rudeness and laxity of the fron- 
tiers. 

It is a splendid record of enterprise and fervid de- 
votion — the Presbyterian pioneers — matching the 
energy of the Methodist circuit-rider, and carrying 
on the emotional fervor of the evangelist with the 
regard for instruction and government characteristic 



SOME DISTINCTIVE CONTRIBUTIONS 219 

of the Church. Thompson, in his history of the Pres- 
byterian Church, speaking of the rapid growth in the 
settlements of New York and Ohio, gives a true pic- 
ture of the energy and zeal of the early preachers: 

" They rode on long circuits through the pathless 
forests or over unbroken prairies, where the bending 
of the stalks of grass showed the trail. They slept 
at night under a tree, beside a fire kept alight to scare 
off beasts of prey; or they shared the rude shelter 
and rough fare of the settler. If they found homes 
for their families it was in rude shanties of two 
rooms where they eked out existence far from schools, 
physician and stores, often laboring with their own 
hands. They met every form of resistance, from 
stolid indiflference to avowed infidelity. They encoun- 
tered drunkenness, lewdness, horse-racing, gambling, 
and Sabbath breaking in the newer settlements. But 
nothing disheartened them or broke down their faith 
in God and the Gospel, and bit by bit they saw better 
influences become pervasive, and the order of a Chris- 
tian civilization replacing the wild lawlessness of an 
earlier day" (p. 94). 

There is little time to speak of men who laid the 
foundations of our church. There was Tennant, 
whose zeal may have carried him to excess, but whose 
labors led to the Log College and a more thoughtful 
ministry. Whittier in '' the Preacher " has drawn the 
more picturesque features of the man. 

And Celtic Tennant, his long coat bound 
Like a monk's with leathern girdle round, 
Wild with the toss of unshorn hair. 
And wringing of hands, and eyes aglare. 
Groaning under the world's despair. 



220 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

There was Davies, whose preaching inspired the 
eloquence of Patrick Henry, and who afterwards be- 
came President of Princeton College. 

But the most notable name of our early preachers 
was John M. Mason of New York. The popular taste 
would not tolerate the read sermon and yet it de- 
manded a stately and elaborate style, and so the preach- 
ing was largely memoriter. He had an openness of 
mind and a prescience that made him a real leader of 
the Church. It was his practical wisdom that helped 
to unite various Presbyterian fragments into a united 
church. It was his open-mindedness that made the 
beginning of the American Sunday School. 

The line of progressive, effective preachers was car- 
ried on by Albert Barnes of Philadelphia. He was 
the object of theological suspicion and judicial trials 
for heresy, and his teaching marked the growing dif- 
ference between the two wings of the Church, and 
finally led to the division of 1837. ^^^ such publicity 
and the critical attitude of good men was the sorest 
trial to his sensitive and sincere nature. 

He was tall and slender, of refined face and man- 
ner, without the physical elements of the orator but 
making his impression by the worth of his thought, 
the purity of his spirit, and the naturalness and sim- 
plicity of his style. It was an intellectual and spirit- 
ual influence as in the case of Jonathan Edwards. 
He was a teacher in the pulpit but had great weight 
from the loftiness of his character. 

He was most methodical in his habits and prepared 
in the early morning commentaries on nearly all the 
books of the New Testament, of great use to the lay- 
men of the Church. 

He had a sympathy with his age and a practical un- 



SOME DISTINCTIVE CONTRIBUTIONS 221 

derstanding of it that made his preaching practical 
and a zeal and hopefulness that cast its light over 
everything that he did. 

I now mention three men, all active in the last half 
of the nineteenth century, that illustrate the various 
forces contributing to the Presbyterian pulpit and the 
variety of its work, Roswell D. Hitchcock, John Hall 
and Theodore L. Cuyler. 

Dr. Hitchcock left but a single volume of sermons, 
** Eternal Atonement," the twenty sermons that he felt 
most expressive of his message, and all the rest he de- 
stroyed. He was a teacher all his life, at Amherst, 
Bowdoin, Andover and Union Seminary; rhetoric, 
ethics and philosophy and church history. His work 
gave form to his message. He was an occasional 
preacher, and as such his preaching cannot be judged 
by the growth of churches and the number of follow- 
ers. But he lifted the tone of reHgious life wherever 
he spoke. He permanently influenced men untouched 
by the common preacher. And he gave to all who 
knew him the sense of the worth of life and the glory 
of the Gospel that could never be forgotten. He al- 
ways spoke the essential, catholic truth that all men 
needed and all men could receive. He gave it with 
the temper and finish of the most perfect workman- 
ship, and yet no finish of art made the word less ef- 
fective for use. A splendid presence, a penetrative 
and persuasive voice, a spirited manner, a wealth of 
interpretation in instance and imagery made his ser- 
mons an event in the life of the hearer. 

Dr. John Hall was the most notable of the constant 
contributions of the Mother Country to our pulpit. A 
north of Ireland man, trained in her schools, a coun- 



222 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

try minister and then pastor in Dublin, he came to the 
Fifth Avenue Church, New York, in the fullness of 
his manhood. He was a great pastor, ministering 
to all alike and rarely forgetting names and faces. 
He was a man of noble, benignant presence. Like 
Phillips Brooks, the very face and presence of the 
man was eloquent. He had generous training and 
great diligence and the gifts of public speech and he 
made all contribute to his preaching. He honored his 
calling. He made preaching honorable. He always 
ministered to men when he preached. He thought of 
the salvation of men and not of his sermon. He never 
preached great sermons but he was a great preacher. 
'* He always seemed to walk on the edge of the com- 
monplace but never got over into it." 

Dr. Theodore L. Cuyler was a man of less intel- 
lectual power, but of quick, warm sympathies, wide 
human interests, lively fancy and intense earnestness 
in speaking. His sermons combined brightness and 
spirituality. In his prime he was in great demand 
for public occasions, and was not afraid to espouse 
a righteous but unpopular cause. He is a good ex- 
ample of the fervent, practical, spiritual preaching of 
our best pulpits. 

One more name should be mentioned — Grosvenor 
Heacock of Buffalo, the prophet-preacher. Of com- 
manding presence, the voice and manner of an orator, 
an imagination that cut through the crust of opinion 
to the heart of truth, it was his great heart that made 
him the master of assemblies. He spoke the truth as 
God gave him to see it and he won a multitude to the 
faith of his master. But it was, as the interpreter of 
life, the will of the living Lord to social and national 
life that he had his commission and won his supreme 



SOME DISTINCTIVE CONTRIBUTIONS 223 

place. His conception and spirit breathe in his words : 
'' When the pulpit shall, in this land, cease to be a light 
on the great moral and political questions of the day, 
midnight will have fallen on the nation." 

Such examples cannot be comprehensive and com- 
plete. They are only personal selections from a long 
list of men who have exalted and honored the work of 
the pulpit. 

What have the Presbyterians done for our national 
pulpit? They have taught the teaching power of the 
pulpit. They have been careful to teach the Scrip- 
tures. They have given the truths of the Gospel in 
systematic form. They have been doctrinal preach- 
ers, not being afraid to grapple with great problems 
of thought and so they have contributed to a thought- 
ful and stable Christianity. 

7 
Other Contributions 

One naturally asks why the Quakers produced no 
great preacher. They ministered over large parts of 
Pennsylvania and the South. And there is one name 
that cannot be forgotten in the religious history of 
America, that of John Woolman, mystic and ascetic. 
But he is better known for his journal than for his 
sermons. Its barrenness of preachers is explained by 
Dr. Bacon's analysis of the Quaker Movement : ** It 
was never able to outgrow, in the large and free field 
to which it was transplanted, the defects incident of 
its origin in a protest and a schism. It never learned 
to commend itself to men as a church for all Chris- 
tians, and never ceased to be, even in its own con- 
sciousness, a coterie of specialists" (p. 145). 



224 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

Other Protestant bodies, the Lutherans, the Re- 
formed, the German Reformed, the Disciple, and 
others, have not lacked devoted pastors and teachers. 
If they have given to the pulpit few names of national 
fame and influence, it has been largely due to the cir- 
cumstances of their work. They have men to-day 
who are gladly heard and recognized as national forces. 

The Catholic Church does not exalt the pulpit, but 
now and then a priest like Dr. McGlynn and Father 
Doyle of New York stand out as effective preachers. 
While men like Bishop Spalding of Illinois, Arch- 
bishop Ireland of St. Paul and Cardinal Gibbons of 
Baltimore combine great administrative gifts with 
either the excellencies of the essayist or the preacher. 

The Paulist Fathers have exemplified in the Catholic 
Church some of the highest qualities of Protestant 
preaching. 

Even this brief review must impress us with the 
worthy record of the American pulpit. It has con- 
tributed to the higher life of the nation. It has been 
the quickener and trainer of the intellectual life. The 
children of the manse have been our first literary men, 
and the weekly sermon has taught the people to think 
and trained that ideality and taste for the true and 
beautiful and good that have promoted education and 
cultivated the love of books. The pulpit has been 
one of the strong social forces of our life. It has 
taught the worth of the individual and the sacredness 
of human relations, and revealed the foes of our peace, 
and raised its voice for social welfare. In critical 
times the pulpit has trained the forces that made for 
liberty and national unity. It was the powerful revival 
preaching of Edwards and his successors that gave the 
unknown and neglected man his sense of worth and to 



SOME DISTINCTIVE CONTRIBUTIONS 225 

the Colonies that emotional response to truth that made 
them capable of asserting their rights against the in- 
justice of the Home Government, and feeling the stir- 
rings of a new national life. And it was the power of 
the pulpit in the fifties that awoke the conscience of the 
North and prepared the people for the years of sacri- 
fice. And the pulpit of our own day has stood for that 
higher nationalism, for the ideals of justice and freedom 
and brotherhood that have made America a force for 
world- righteousness. 

The pulpit to-day is no less necessary for the life 
of the people. We may not be able clearly to under- 
stand the forces that are preparing. The world in- 
dustry, the power of organization, the solidarity of 
life, the rapid modifying of American ideals by the 
coming together of all nations — these things we dimly 
feel. Shall they not demand a new and larger appli- 
cation of the Gospel ? We stand in a noble line. We 
have entered into the labors of the Fathers, and their 
unfinished tasks. To carry on the work of the pulpit ; 
to make it the witness and teacher of the religious 
life; to send the vivifying and ennobling influence of 
its truths through every part and province of our na- 
tional life is the highest work and honor that can come 
to men. 



X 

THE PRESENT AMERICAN PULPIT 

There has been no intellectual decadence of the 
American pulpit. If the minister is no longer the in- 
tellectual master, it is only because higher education 
has been so widely diffused. If the pulpit is no longer 
the chief agent of culture, it is because the means of 
the higher life have been so multiplied. If the pulpit 
seems no longer the authoritative voice of public opin- 
ion, it is because preaching is far wider than the 
Church. It is the voice of the awakened moral life 
of the age. A President reiterates the primary prin- 
ciples of public morality, or interprets diplomacy in 
the light of Christian brotherhood. A Governor calls 
the citizenship of a state to a finer responsibility. An 
editor or a novelist voices the dim and confused striv- 
ings of an age, or calls for deeper reality in religion. 
Since Plymouth Rock, preaching has never been a 
greater element than now. 

The pulpit thinks as much as ever, and more men 
are trained for their work. Great branches of the 
Church, like the Baptists and the Methodists, that 
fifty years ago were served by a multitude of good 
but untrained men, have made increasing intellectual 
demands upon their ministry. 

The Theological Seminary, naturally conservative 
in method, has felt the spirit and principles of the 
new education. The field of thought is far wider; 
it has opened its doors to a multitude of subjects re- 
lated to our modern life. The temptation no doubt 

226 



THE PRESENT AMERICAN PULPIT 227 

is to a smattering of many things and a mastery of 
none. But many of them are interests vital to reli- 
gion. And strong, faithful men are made stronger 
by them. 

The widening of the interests of religion, the fel- 
lowship with great thinkers and writers, the forma- 
tion of truer taste, all have left their mark upon the 
pulpit. 

Of course there are men who say foolish things, 
who appeal to prejudice and false sentiment, who 
show themselves in the place of the truth, who have 
exaggeration and diffuseness and other elements of 
unreality in style. But compare the average sermon 
of fifty years ago with that of to-day. The present 
sermon has more practical thinking, if not so much 
high speculation, and is clothed in appropriate speech, 
not a peculiar dialect of religion, but the clear, pic- 
torial and attractive speech that men put into the best 
conversation and the best books. There have been 
great masters of style in the past and we can always 
learn from them; wells of English pure and undefiled 
from which will always flow sweet waters, but the 
present is a gain in directness and simplicity, in va- 
riety and genuineness, in fine feeling and persuasive- 
ness. You can feel that even by taking the notable 
preachers. Making all allowance for the difference of 
personality and times, you come to the conclusion that 
the former days are not better than these. 

There were masters, and I have tried to interpret 
their work from Jonathan Edwards to Phillips Brooks. 
It may be that no great master will rise from the mul- 
titude of preachers to-day. But that we have such a 
multitude of men of light and leading is cause for pro- 
found gratitude and hope. No equal number in the 



228 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

past have surpassed them in vigorous thought and in 
mastery of speech. For four and five years before 
the War we had resident preachers every month — 
thirty to forty in all, from many denominations. And 
I would like to testify to the fine manhood and vital 
message of these men. Very few of them failed of 
our high expectation. 

There has been no moral decadence in the Ameri- 
can pulpit. Free men speak the word and not hire- 
lings. The ministry witnesses to the power of moral 
ideals. 

On every hand there is testimony that it is not an 
easy time to live a simple, pure, unselfish life, to be 
a servant of men. The widening of the horizon of 
thought, awakening problems that refuse to be stated 
wholly under the conventional terms of faith, the 
breaking down of the barriers of isolation and the 
coming in upon American life of other standards of 
living, the multiplying of the means of enjoyment, 
the hard maxims of commercial greed, the subtle and 
refined selfishness that sometimes seems almost like 
the encompassing atmosphere of modern life — all 
these have never seriously lowered the tone of the 
pulpit. Single ones have become worldly, but the min- 
istry as a class have tried to build after the pattern 
seen in the Mount. And the conception of this heav- 
enly life seems rather to have grown in the mind of 
the ministry. You have but to contrast any large 
group of men with that of fifty or a hundred years 
ago to know that the working ideals of the ministry 
are lofty. There is care for personal conduct. As 
the authority of the mere position is felt to be less, 
the man strives to be more. As the speech of the pul- 
pit is not accepted on authority, but tested like any 



THE PRESENT AMERICAN PULPIT 229 

other speech, there is a new striving to make the mes- 
sage conform to the truth. As the pulpit has grown 
in true humihty and is no longer willing to dogmatize 
about some subjects that seemed clear and certain 
as noonday to the fathers, the emphasis has rested 
upon other questions of practical living. Our pulpit 
stands out for its ideality. The sermon holds up a 
lofty ideal of living, and the preacher means what he 
says, and preaches first to himself. 

I think there can be no doubt that the modern pul- 
pit has gained greatly in what Dr. Watson calls the 
humanness of preaching. It begins to discuss truth 
from the standpoint of man, from his nature and need 
and actual experience. It does not lower the demands 
of the truth, the authority of God's word, but it more 
frankly admits the difficulties of belief and life, the 
limitation of human power, and tries to make truth 
reasonable and so present it that it will seem desirable 
and possible. 

It is said that there is more interest in life than 
theology. It does not mean any the less that we need 
to know God and have the help of God, but that re- 
ligious truth is looked at from our standpoint. It 
tries to take the position of the race, the attitude of 
God in the Incarnation, expressing the essential unity 
of God's nature with man, that God does what a man 
would like to do at his best. It holds that theology 
is Christocentric. '* Through Man to God," the title 
of sermons by Dr. Gordon, expresses the attitude and 
process to-day. And such certainly is the message 
of the best of our pulpits. 

Take up any good volume of sermons and you will 
see this absorbing interest in life. The subjects 
chosen, the illustrations used, the manifest motive felt 



230 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

through it all, have to do with life, life as we feel it 
to-day in its complex and organic relation. 

Facing the Dawn, The Passing of Opportunity, Re- 
deeming the Time, The Social Epiphany — sermons 
from a volume of George Hodges. The Actual and 
the Ideal, The Impossible Commandment, The Sin- 
fulness of Worry, Christianity and Wealth, from 
**Doctrine and Deed '' by Dr. Jefferson. Moral Lead- 
ership, Moral Responsibility, Moral Privilege, The 
Church in the House, all from a volume by Dr. 
Leighton Parks of St. Bartholomew's. 

And these titles are significant of the characteristic 
accent of the pulpit of to-day. There is not less of 
God but more of man, more understanding of man, 
more adaptation to man, more faith in the Divine 
capacity of man and God's Spirit actually working 
with the faculties of man and through the process of 
human life, a realization of the fact that Christianity 
is first of all a life, a divine life among men, that 
the Kingdom of God is something here, and that its 
ideal is to be progressively realized by forces now 
working in human hearts. And if men can thus in- 
terpret the spiritual meaning of life, they will know 
that they cannot live by bread, but by every word that 
proceedeth from the mouth of God. 

A few quotations from recent sermons will show 
this keen and sympathetic observation of life and the 
speaking of the divinest truth in the terms of human 
experience. 

'* Ideals we do not make. We discover them, not 
invent them. 'See that thou make them after the 
pattern that was showed thee in the Mount.' That 
command comprises all commands. It enjoins it upon 
us to make the ideal real : to be men in the divine way. 



THE PRESENT AMERICAN PULPIT 231 

Once it has been done : in Galilee. The ideal and the 
real met in Jesus. He could say, Follow me. Be ye 
therefore perfect, he said to the men about him. 
Looking unto Jesus, wrote the Apostle." 

We cannot mistake the suggestive, vital, virile way 
that Dr. Parkhurst lays hold of the truth of the Gos- 
pel and of human life and shows their exact and so 
divine fitness to each other. 

Here is a passage on '' The Moral Conflict," urging 
the fact of God indwelling as a motive to endeavor: 

** The task is still hard, and we have to struggle 
and fight, and so often to fight alone with no one else 
to see, in our little secret obscurities, in our little se- 
cret dwelling-places, with no one else to know how 
hard it is, no one else to help and cheer us on and 
applaud us. Yet we see now and know what that 
treasure is which we are fighting for: and the evil 
desire ungranted and the evil word unspoken and the 
self-indulgence restrained and the passionate speech 
suppressed and the lust of the flesh denied, the cause 
good and right, that seems so hopeless, helped — it is 
God; it is the gold, men and women, separated from, 
purified, refined, coming out of the dirt, or out of the 
hard and rocky quartz, and making us very rich. 
That is the treasure which we have within us. Let 
us see and call it that. Then we shall know what it 
is we are doing or what we are failing to do; that 
when we give expression to the moral life within us 
we are giving expression to the God within us; that 
when we reveal and body forth that moral life in our 
flesh and blood, that when in doubt and darkness and 
perplexity we yet believe and trust in and cast our- 
selves upon that moral life within us, we are believing 
and trusting in and casting ourselves on God; that 



232 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

when we disregard it and are careless and heedless 
about it, when we think it of little worth, when we 
neglect it and throw it away, we are thinking God of 
little worth, we are throwing away the greatest treas- 
ure which this universe can give us and has given 
us — we are throwing God away." ^ 

Here is the thought of moral struggle put in a new 
way, the eternal truth put into the form of present 
thought of God, and spoken in a simple and sympa- 
thetic directness that must carry the sense of reality 
to every person. 

Take this passage from Dr. Jefferson on the high, 
mysterious truth of the Holy Spirit. *' Jesus did not 
say much about the Holy Spirit until he neared the 
end of his life. It was not until he came into the 
Upper Chamber, at the very end of his career, that 
he brought out in all its fullness the great doctrine 
which was to bring courage and life. The disciples 
sat round him broken-hearted. It seemed as if all the 
stars had fallen from the sky. In every soul there was 
anxiety and forebodings and fears. It was then that 
Jesus began to speak to them about the other helper 
that would abide with them forever. And as he spoke 
all the room became light again, and the chill in the 
air, which had been put there by doubt and fear, 
melted away in the glow of the summer which his new 
teaching created. 

'' We are living in dark and troubled times. One can- 
not pick up a paper or a book without reading some- 
thing of the horrible materialism, the greedy, grasp- 
ing commercialism of our age. Men everywhere are 
in dismay because of the complexity and multitude of 
our social and religious problems. There is no mes- 

1 " From Things to God," Bishop Greer, p. 144. 



THE PRESENT AMERICAN PULPIT 233 

sage so helpful and so strengthening which the Church 
can possibly give to the people as just this message 
which lies embodied in our text, * Receive ye the Holy 
Spirit.' 

" See what he does. Jesus told his disciples that the 
other helper would do these four things, and for nine- 
teen centuries he has been doing them, even as Jesus 
did. 

'* * He shall teach you all things.' Does he teach 
you? The teacher in the school stands behind the 
desk at which sits the little boy puzzling his head over 
a sum which is difficult to do, and the teacher leads 
him along step by step, correcting his blunders and 
making luminous the way. Do you believe there is a 
teacher standing by your side teaching you day by 
day how to do the things that are difficult to do ? ' He 
shall guide you into all truth.' We cannot get into 
truth at a bound, we must be led into it a step at a 
time. There is one who goes before us pointing out 
the way throwing light upon the path where our next 
step shall fall. Does he guide you? 

** ' He shall glorify me. He shall take the things of 
mine and show them unto you.' When we are most 
under the influence of the Holy Spirit, we see no 
man but Jesus only. In our lower moods the various 
characters of history seem attractive to us, but in our 
highest moods there is but one who is altogether lovely, 
and that is the man of Galilee. Saints in their dying 
hours, when the old earth falls away, and the loved 
faces are lost in the mist, see what our eyes are not 
permitted to behold, the King in his beauty. Does 
the Holy Spirit glorify our Lord for you? Through 
the last ten years, for instance, has his character 
seemed increasingly majestic? Has his face to you 



234 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

grown more tender and beautiful? Have you received 
the Holy Spirit? 

" * He dwelleth with you and shall be in you.' That 
is the greatest promise of them all. He is not only 
the teacher by our side, and the guide who goes be- 
fore, and the revealer of spiritual things, but he is 
the guest of the heart. He gives a peace that the 
world cannot give. He breathes into the soul a joy 
which the world cannot take away. He creates a 
blessedness that cannot be expressed. Does he dwell 
in you? Would it be so difficult to forgive and for- 
get if you had received the Holy Spirit? Would it 
not be easier to be patient, courageous and true, to 
turn away from everything that is mean and con- 
temptible and low, if you had opened your heart to 
this other helper? Alas for you, if the Holy Spirit 
is not your teacher, not your guide, not your revealer, 
not a guest in the soul." In this perfectly natural, 
human, convincing way does Dr. Jeflferson interpret 
the greatest fact of experience — the truth that cannot 
be proved. 

One more brief extract, this from Dr. Leighton 
Parks of St. Bartholomew's, New York. 

" ' Watch — be on the lookout — for ye know not 
when the son of man will come,' not to destroy but 
to bless. Why should it not be so? To some of you 
in this coming year will come a new and beautiful life. 
Some woman will press a babe to her breast, some man 
will have opened before him larger opportunities for 
showing what sort of man he is. Some of us, I hope, 
will change our sense of value and think that good- 
ness is the best thing in the world. Some of you will 
know something of what it means to be near God. 



THE PRESENT AMERICAN PULPIT 235 

The Son of Man, the Divine Spirit in human life, 
will come to you." 

Such teachings make the wayside bush aflame with 
God and sacraments of the spirit out of the common 
experiences of life. 

This sermon is marked by simplicity, directness, 
charm — above all humanity, direct appeal to the spir- 
itual faculties of man and faith in their capacity — 
in the Holy Spirit working with every honest effort 
of man. 

I think that variety should be noted as another char- 
acteristic of the American pulpit. 

We have no longer a single, commanding mind, as 
Edwards in the eighteenth century or even Bushnell, 
or Beecher or Brooks in the nineteenth to form defi- 
nite ideals of message and method, and to be studied 
and followed in definite laws for the common man. 

As life has become more complex and multiform, 
so it is more individual. And as the critical spirit 
has destroyed mere external authority and driven men 
inward, to seek for deeper realities, the sense of per- 
sonal message has been strengthened, each man has 
prophesied " according to his proportion of faith." 
So the American pulpit presents a greater variety of 
individual types than ever before. 

There are so many good preachers — more than 
ever before, good in the sense of presenting a living 
truth, and a truth that comes from their life — in a 
wealth of attractive, persuasive forms, that it is no 
longer possible for one man to tower so much above 
the rest. The absence of striking figures is not due 
to the poverty of the pulpit but to its excellence. 

And so we have many representative men — preach- 



236 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

ers that are men for occasions like Dr. Cadman of 
Brooklyn, Bishop McDowell of the Methodist Church; 
men that preach to special audiences as College men, 
like Hugh Black or Dr. Fitch or Dean Brown of Yale ; 
preachers to the reason and the conscience like Dr. 
Parkhurst and Dr. Jefferson; men who address the 
common needs and instincts of men like Bishop Brent ; 
men who appeal to the emotions like Bishop McCon- 
nell; men who unfold the Scriptures like Dr. Kirke 
of Baltimore. Men of the old theology like Dr. 
Goodell and Dr. Woelf kin ; men of the newer theology 
like Dr. Gordon and Henry Sloan Coffin; men of rich 
rhetorical gifts like Dr. Hillis; men of scientific plain- 
ness and precision like Lyman Abbott; men with the 
social message like Bishop Williams and John Haynes 
Holmes and Rabbi Wise. Such names suggest the 
fullness and many sidedness of the American pulpit. 
The man who sees in the modern pulpit signs of decay, 
and talks of the giants of former days, must be singu- 
larly lacking in appreciation. 

It would be easy to mention a hundred names from 
different churches, many from the Central West, who 
are carrying on the best traditions of the American 
pulpit. I hope it will not seem invidious to mention 
a small group of the Church with which the writer 
is most familiar. 

I doubt if the Presbyterian Church in New York 
was ever served by four men superior to Henry Sloan 
Coffin, John Kelman, Dr. William L. Merrill and Dr. 
Fosdick. Dr. Kirke of Baltimore is an inspiring ex- 
ample of expository work. And men like Dr. Mac- 
CauU of Philadelphia, Charles Wood of Washington, 
William R. Taylor of Rochester, William V. V. 
Holmes of Buffalo, John Timothy Stone of Chicago 



THE PRESENT AMERICAN PULPIT 237 

make us grateful and hopeful for the American pul- 

If our pulpit has not lost in intellectual power, or 
elevation of life; if it has gained in humanity, and 
in variety; in the understanding of human life and 
deep sympathy with it, and through its varied per- 
sonality, the power to present truth to the manifold 
nature and need of humanity — then surely we must 
expect a greatly increased power from the modern 
pulpit. 

Here our analysis seems to fail. The effect upon 
men does not seem in keeping with what we have 
claimed as the worth of the pulpit. Think of the 
thousands of pulpits (to paraphrase Robertson) that 
speak in our land every Sunday what each preacher 
considers the truth of Christ. Is it God's word that 
is preached ? Has He changed His purpose ? Has He 
ceased to care for man? And does He no longer in- 
tend that His word shall not return to Him void? 
Yet where is the divine evidence that it is His word 
which is preached, as shown in hearts quickened and 
aroused about their Father's business? 

Why does the American church halt in its onward 
course — and halt it has — if the preacTiing is what 
it ought to be? 

There is a widespread criticism of the pulpit. Some 
men say the pulpit must stop preaching social ethics 
and return to the old doctrines. The sense of sin 
is lacking in modern life and that can only be pro- 
duced by the old theology. Others say present-day 
topics have crowded out Scriptural instruction. There 
is preaching to sentiment and fancy, but not to con- 
science and will. It is a frequent criticism in current 
literature that the preacher suffers from aloofness. 



238 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

He does not get honest criticism and so he often fails 
to present the truth to exact needs. I do not think 
any of these criticisms go deep enough. They are not 
the real cause of so much of the apparent futility 
of preaching. 

The truth is we are living in a transition period. 
The subtle materialism and the critical spirit and the 
social unrest affect the Church. But apparent loss 
may be real gain. In the process the vision of Christ 
is being clarified, and the conception of the Kingdom 
enlarged. 

Dr. John Watson in an address at Aberdeen Uni- 
versity on *' The Return to the Gospel," showed the 
influence of criticism and the High Church idea in 
weakening the power of the Gospel message. Criti- 
cism had to come — the necessary transition from dog- 
matism to religion — but the critical spirit is not the 
evangelizing spirit. The High Church idea was 
needed and it has done good, but it obscures the idea 
of the prophet. 

The Gospel will be rethroned, said Dr. Watson. 
'* For a while the Gospel has gone into exile and 
ceased to have its ancient power. It is coming back 
again to the throne, and the day of its tribulation will 
not have been lost, when we welcome before we die, 
and our children after us, a still more generous and 
convincing Gospel. It will have gained a wider vision 
and a more gracious charity. It will declare a more 
gracious God, a more human Christ, a more hopeful 
message. There is no man who ought not to pray 
and hope for its new advent, since it will mean the 
rebirth of faith. The days of chilling doubt and un- 
certain speech will have passed away. . . . Preachers 
will again stand in the pulpit as the messengers of 



THE PRESENT AMERICAN PULPIT 239 

God, rebuking men boldly for their sins in the name 
of the Eternal, and assuring the penitent of the divine 
mercy. . . . What can never be done by learning or 
by ritual shall be accomplished before our eyes, when 
the voice of the Gospel is once more heard in its 
clearness and fullness. . . . We are in the valley now 
where the shadows lie heavy; but already the east is 
reddening, and we shall live to see the feet of God's 
messengers, beautiful upon the mountains, because 
they are bringing good tidings of good, because they 
are publishing Salvation." 

If we think of the modern American pulpit as a 
whole, it does not seem to have an overmastering and 
compelling sense of message. 

It may be that it is too hurried for that, that it does 
not follow the Apostle's injunction *' to think on these 
things," until in quietness and concentration of mind 
it gains that clearness and fullness of vision that is the 
source of all profound conviction and all moving feel- 
ing. 

And it is due also, I think, far more to the natural 
and special influences of speech in a Republic. Speech 
here as in the ancient Republic of Greece has had an 
undue importance in public matters. We are known 
as a nation of ready talkers. There are men of uni- 
versal and superficial knowledge who are willing to 
talk at a moment's notice on every conceivable sub- 
ject. And people are unduly influenced by fluent 
speech and persuasive manner. Religious life is vi- 
tally affected by its environment, breathing its atmos- 
phere, adopting its methods and using its forces. The 
development of our Christianity has been largely by 
mass movements, through the power of popular speech 
and not so much by careful religious education and 



240 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

the forming of the habits of the religious life. The 
pulpit of many of our churches has been wide open 
to any one who had an earnest purpose and a ready 
tongue. This has emphasized speech more than 
thought, the man more than the reality of the mes- 
sage. 

Then there has been no general recognition here of 
the essential catholic truth, the message of Christian- 
ity. We are a polyglot of races and tongues and 
churches. We have been the very Paradise of Sec- 
tarianism — the one hundred sixty-five different de- 
nominations often the expression of an excessive and 
eccentric individualism. So men have been tempted 
to preach an ism as the form of the Gospel, and to 
dwell upon differences rather than the unity of the 
Faith. Through this influence the preacher has had 
more of a personal following — the very body of be- 
lievers has been called Mr. So-and-So's church — and 
the personal gifts have been exalted at the expense 
of the message. 

We have many hopeful signs of the lessening of this 
divisive individualism, in breaking down the walls of 
separation, in the growing unity of conception and 
spirit in the life of the American pulpit. 

But I think a critical comparison of the American 
pulpit with the English and Scotch will convict us 
of less reliance upon the thorough grasp of the truth 
and more trust in brightness of speech and attractive- 
ness of person. In England and Scotland fluency is 
apt to be discounted as the mark of the superficial. 
The people will listen if a man has something to say. 
They are not so easily swept away by popular gifts. 
They want first sincerity of life and reality of mes;. 
?age. 



THE PRESENT AMERICAN PULPIT 241 

However any wide reading of the American pulpit 
will bring the spirit of joy and gratitude that God is 
speaking through so many noble men. But it will 
also admonish us that we must do everything in our 
power to cultivate a more thoughtful and spiritual life, 
that we must have a keener sense of the sacredness 
of speech, that we must exalt the essential things 
of faith, and we must remember that our message is 
not essentially an ethic or a philosophy but a redemp- 
tion. 

A professor of a great university said to the writer 
that he had heard the University Sermons for a year, 
and few distinctive Christian notes. That recalls 
Blackstone's remark of the eighteenth century pulpit 
of London, *' No more Gospel than the essays of 
Cicero." One questions the truth of the criticism but 
it reveals a tendency. 

Old forms of Christian truth have passed away and 
men have not thought through far enough to clothe 
the truth in new forms. In doctrinal uncertainty, 
like sincere men, they turn to what they do know and 
declare the ethical truths and practical duties of life. 
Religion is real and the source of all true life, but a 
certain vagueness and elusiveness lies over its facts 
like the veil of mist over an autumn landscape. Some 
have lost the evangelistic purpose, the passion for 
souls, the urgency of appeal. 

We do not understand the Gospel or the human 
heart if we ignore sin and the redemptive power of 
Christ. 

The crucible of war has brought out some neglected 
truths. It tells us that we need a ** Gospel that will 
deal with the evil bias and spiritual impotence of the 
human heart, and by its assurance of a forgiveness in 



242 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

Christ and a proclamation of the power of the Holy 
Spirit meet the need of a sinful man. ... It is not 
too much to hope that the soft and easy message of the 
past years will cease to be heard and the message of 
redemption for sinful man become the evangel of the 
years to come." So writes a Scotch preacher from 
the realities uncovered by God's hot plowshares. 

The Gospel means the growth and enrichment and 
perfection of the soul and a redeemed society of men. 
But its initial is the relation of the individual life to 
God through Jesus Christ. The Gospel is the most 
effective ethic, but it must be a redemption or it can 
have no expulsive and transforming power in human 
life. This is the great message for the modern pulpit. 



XI 

THE PULPIT AND SOCIAL WELFARE 

I wish first to show in brief outline the historic re- 
lation of the American pulpit to the interests of so- 
ciety: then to analyze the social life and needs of 
our time, finding that new occasions teach new duties ; 
and finally out of the history of the American pulpit 
and the demands of the present, asking what is the 
true attitude of the pulpit towards the problems of 
society. 

The Church and the State were one in early New 
England. The Puritans came hither not so much for 
freedom of worship as to establish on these shores 
a Theocracy, in which society should be founded on 
the Bible and all its laws made and interpreted by the 
Gospel. In such a conception the Church was the 
State and her ministers exercised the controlling in- 
fluence. 

'* In the little Theocracy which the Pilgrims estab- 
lished in the Wilderness, the ministry was the only 
order of nobility. They were the only privileged 
class, and their voice it was that decided ex cathedra 
on all questions both in Church and State, from the 
choice of a Governor to that of the district school 
teacher/' 

Town meetings were often called in connection with 
the mid-week lectures, the civil notices were read be- 
fore the sermon on Sabbath morning, or posted on the 

243 



244 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

corner of the meeting-house. Only members of the 
Church had the rights of citizenship and the Church 
was supported as the State by public taxation. So 
questions of society were felt to be religious; and 
while theology strictly so called was the substance 
of the preaching, social questions were freely dis- 
cussed in the pulpit without any thought of the danger 
of secularizing it. There was no divorce even in 
thought between the sacred and the secular. All was 
sacred: it was done unto the Lord. 

The political action and teaching of that early pul- 
pit stands out even more distinctly than its spiritual. 
Nathaniel Ward preached a notable sermon in 1641 
on *' The Body of Liberties." As early as 1643 John 
Cotton began to preach election sermons to the depu- 
ties. Increase Mather was the chief agent in securing 
the new charter of Massachusetts in 1688. 

The theocratic idea of the Puritans began to break 
down under their persecution of the Quakers. A 
theocracy implies uniformity of religion, all members 
of the same church. Grant the presence of non-con- 
formists and the sense of injustice at once begins to 
work. When the numbers of non-church members 
and so of disfranchised citizen grows to be four- 
fifths of the whole — as in New England before the 
end of the century — and you have the prophecy of 
the downfall of the theocratic idea. With the intro- 
duction of another church, as King's Chapel, Boston, 
and the growth here of the Old World divisions of 
the Church, civil justice demands the separation of 
the Church and State. But before the " Emancipa- 
tion of Mass," other colonies were developing distinct 
types of religious life, the Baptists in Rhode Island, 
the Reformed Church in New York, the Quakers and 



THE PULPIT AND SOCIAL WELFARE 245 

Moravians in Pennsylvania, the Catholics in Mary- 
land, the Episcopal Church in Virginia. All this 
looked for the separation of Church and State before 
there could be the Union of Colonies in a national 
life. But with the gradual lessening of the theocratic 
idea, the pulpit did not lose its interest and influence 
in social life. It did not seek so much personally to 
direct, as to furnish moral and spiritual ideals and 
leaders. 

Think of the notable influence of Theodore Hooker 
in the early life of Connecticut. Whole churches and 
their ministers had emigrated from the Massachusetts 
Colony to the Connecticut River Valley not only on 
account of more room for growth, but out of desire 
for a freer atmosphere than the Massachusetts the- 
ocracy. 

" At the opening sessions of the General Court, May 
31, 1638, at Hartford (the beginning of Connecticut) 
Mr. Hooker preached a sermon of wonderful power, 
in which he maintained that the foundation of au- 
thority is laid in the free consent of the people, that 
the choice of public magistrates belongs unto the peo- 
ple by God's own allowance, and that they who have 
power to appoint officers and magistrates have the 
right also to set the bounds and limitations of the 
power and place unto which they call them. On the 
fourteenth of January, 1639, ^.11 the freemen of the 
three towns assembled at Hartford and adopted a 
written constitution in which the hand of the great 
preacher is clearly discernible. It does not prescribe 
any condition of church membership for the right of 
suflfrage. It was the first written Constitution known 
to history that created a Government, and it marked 
the beginnings of American democracy, of which 



246 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

Thomas Hooker deserves more than any other man 
to be called the father. The Government of the 
United States to-day is in lineal descent more nearly 
related to that of Connecticut than to that of any of 
the other thirteen colonies." ^ 

Earlier in the same volume Mr. Fiske pays a noble 
tribute to the influence of Calvinism on civil liberty, 
in removing all distinctions of rank and fortune in 
the presence of the Sovereign God. ** It was a reli- 
gion fit to inspire men who were to be called upon to 
fight for freedom, whether in the marshes of the Neth- 
erlands or on the moors of Scotland. In a church, 
moreover, based upon such a theology, there was no 
room for prelacy. Each single church tended to be- 
come an independent congregation of worshipers, con- 
tributing one of the most effective schools that has 
ever existed for training men in local self-govern- 
ment " (p. 58). And Mr. Byington in ''The Puritan 
in England and New England," thus summarizes the 
molding power of the colonial pulpit upon the State: 
'* Their theological views tended to make them the 
defenders of liberty. They laid the foundations of 
the Republic. Their churches were democratic. So 
were their towns. So were the Colonies, as far as 
the people were permitted to frame their Government. 
And when George III, far on in the eighteenth cen- 
tury, attempted to deprive the English colonists of 
their rights as Englishmen, the descendants of these 
Calvinistic Puritans took the lead in the Revolution 
which made us a free nation." 

We must not forget the arrest of Francis Makemie 
for free preaching in New York, and his successful 

1 Fiske, " Beginnings of New England," p. 127. 



THE PULPIT AND SOCIAL WELFARE 247 

defense of free speech that gave rehgious liberty to 
the Presbyterian Church throughout the Colonies, and 
marks an era in the growth of free ideas in America. 

But the chief honor is due to Roger WilHams and 
his successors in the Baptist ministry for their war- 
fare against the ** privileges of the powerful standing 
order of New England and of the moribund establish- 
ments of the South," and their victory for liberty of 
conscience and worship and equality before the law 
for all alike. 

It is safe to say that we had never been a nation 
without the teachings of the American pulpit. There 
had been no Revolution save for the influence of the 
clergy. It is true that but one, Witherspoon, was a 
signer of the Declaration of Independence, but a mul- 
titude were felt in that instrument and in the heroic 
struggle that gave meaning and efficiency to the words. 
Upon June i, 1774, the Boston Post Bill was to go 
into effect. It was a solemn day throughout New 
England kept by fasting and prayers. Public fast days 
were held in different Colonies that summer, with pub- 
lic teaching of the rights and privileges of the peo- 
ple. When General Gage, the royalist Governor of 
Massachusetts, refused to call such a day, saying *' the 
request was only to give opportunity for sedition to 
flow from the pulpit," the associated ministers of Bos- 
ton agreed upon a day, and this action was spread 
abroad and the day kept throughout New England, 
even in the far-distant settlements of Maine. Could 
General Gage have heard the sermons, whose titles 
have come down to us, he would certainly have been 
confirmed in his suspicions : *' The duty of a people 
under the oppression of man," ** Despotism illustrated 
and impressed from the character of Rehoboam," 



248 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

" The misery and duty of an oppressed and enslaved 
people." 

The autumn thanksgiving was another day of pa- 
triotic sermons. That of William Gordon of Rox- 
bury, afterwards delivered as the Boston lecture, did 
much by its bold utterance to increase the spirit of 
resistance. '* The way to escape an attack is to be in 
readiness to receive it. While administration consists 
of those that have avowed their dislike to the princi- 
ples of this continent, and the known friends of Amer- 
ica are excluded, there should be no dependence upon 
the fair speeches or actual promises of any, but the 
colonies should pursue the means of safety as vigor- 
ously as ever, that they may not be surprised." The 
man was called " a reverend politician," a '* Christian 
sower of sedition " and other terms of opprobrium, al- 
ways easily used by those who would cover their own 
unrighteousness by assumed zeal for the purity of 
religion. 

When the minute men of Concord and Lexington 
were making the first open stand for liberty April 19, 
1775, the people of Connecticut were just as earnestly 
engaged, everywhere in their churches " supplicating 
Almighty God in fasting and prayer for a blessing 
upon their endeavors to preserve their liberties." ^* It 
was thus given to some to fight, and to others to pray. 
The ministers were firing the people's hearts with 
courage, and unwittingly preparing the men of war 
to march before many hours at the Lexington alarm." 

More than one minister proclaimed the duty of 
the hour, and throwing aside his gown, stood before 
his people in the uniform of a Continental and him- 
self led the men of his congregation to the field. 
More than one sword flashed as the sword of the Lord. 



THE PULPIT AND SOCIAL WELFARE 249 

And through the long years of struggle and sacrifice, 
it was the constant teaching of the Christian pulpit 
and the ceaseless prayers of Christian homes, 

That made those heroes dare 

To die, or leave their children free. 

And after the war, during the trying times of na- 
tional construction, when the interests and opinions of 
the Colonies seemed so diverse, the pulpit with its spir- 
itual vision of opportunity, however imperfect the vi- 
sion, worked powerfully with men like Hamilton and 
Madison in teaching the necessity of a strong union 
and binding the States together in a genuine national 
life. Men differed in the pulpit as elsewhere, but as 
a class the ministry felt the divine meaning of na- 
tionality and worked for the adoption of the Consti- 
tution of 1787, and for the development of an orderly 
and united life. 

The next ten years illustrate the danger as well as 
the necessity of a reHgion applied to the whole life of 
man. The war of parties succeeded the war of Inde- 
pendence. The Federalists stood for a strong central 
Government with sympathies that attached them by 
tradition and principle with the Mother Country. The 
Democrats emphasized the doctrine of individualism 
in regard to person and State and drew much of their 
inspiration from the doctrines of the French Revolu- 
tion. Political doctrines were badly mixed and con- 
fused with questions of religion. French influence 
had been strong in our war and it was natural that 
the vices of French life, gayety, self-indulgence and 
unbelief, should have their followers in American life. 
It was the natural sequence of the excitements of war, 
the natural attendant of the hazards of a new world. 



250 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

Infidel tracts were sown broadcast. Christian people 
were alarmed. Parties made capital of the excited 
condition without discrimination or principle just as 
they are doing now with Americanism and the League 
of Peace. Democrat and Jacobin and Infidel were to 
some minds the same dreaded specter as in our day 
there is by some the thoughtless confusion of anar- 
chist, socialist and infidel. Fast days and Thanks- 
giving days were turned into party discussions. In a 
proclamation for a national fast President John Adams 
declared " the most precious interests of the people 
of the United States are still held in jeopardy by the 
hostile designs and insidious arts of a foreign nation, 
as well as by the dissemination among them of those 
principles subversive of the foundations of all reli- 
gious, moral and social obligations." Every political 
preacher put this in his bow. No wonder that the 
ministers thought the very foundations were being de- 
stroyed when the ideas of Tom Paine were filling 
the minds of young men. And they set themselves to 
resist and overcome French influence. Had they been 
clear from partisan politics no harm could result. 
But no line could be clearly drawn between religion 
and irreligion. And the partisan arguments of the 
pulpit repelled many hearers, who became the easy 
spoil of infidelity. ** How much, think you, has reli- 
gion been benefited by sermons, intended to show that 
Satan and Cain were Jacobins? How much by ser- 
mons in which every deistical argument has been pre- 
sented with its greatest force as being a part of the 
Republican creed? Is this, men of God, following the 
precept. Feed my sheep, feed my lambs ? " 

** The agitations of this decade in the churches of 
New England did much to dethrone the royal influ- 



THE PULPIT AND SOCIAL WELFARE 251 

ence of the one church which in many towns had 
hitherto united the people in their worship. The reli- 
gious influence of the minister was greatly lessened in 
the end. He had pleased some of his own opinion for 
the time, but he had lost something of his preeminence 
and authority as the spiritual patriarch of the com- 
munity." 

The share which the pulpit took in forming our na- 
tional life has been kept in the work of purifying and 
developing our society. Men have been brave and 
loving in applying the law of Christ to our social 
relations. 

A false code of honor, almost unknown in the 
North, but developed in the South as more directly 
the heir of aristocratic institutions, after the Revolu- 
tionary War, came to be a common mode of settling 
personal differences. The duel was the reign of pas- 
sion and force over law and society. It was not until 
the nation had been shocked by the death of the most 
gifted man of public life, Alexander Hamilton, that 
effective voices were raised against this vestige of 
barbarism. It remained for a young minister of East 
Hampton, Long Island, to preach a sermon that roused 
the conscience of the nation. " The blood streams, and 
the victim welters on the ground. And see the victor 
coward running from the field, and, for a few days, 
like Cain a fugitive and a vagabond, until the first burst 
of indignation has passed, and the hand of time has 
soothed the outraged sensibility of the community; 
then publicly, and, as if to add insult to injustice, re- 
turning to offer his services and to pledge his honor 
that your lives and your rights shall be safe in his 
hands." The sermon of President Nott of Union Col- 
lege may have received more praise and became a 



252 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

classic of the pulpit, but the sermon of young Lyman 
Beecher was God's blow against the wrong. '* An 
impession was made that never ceased. It started a 
series of efforts that have affected the whole northern 
mind at least." " That sermon has never ceased to 
be a power in the politics of this country/' wrote 
Leonard Bacon fifty years after. '* More than any- 
thing else, it made the name of brave old Andrew 
Jackson distasteful to the moral and religious feeling 
of the people. It hung like a millstone on the neck 
of Henry Clay." 

The same brave and loyal minister began the per- 
sistent and systematic efforts to check the evils of the 
drinking habits of modern society. Dr. Rush, an 
eminent physician, had published in 1804 his '' Inquiry 
into the effects of Ardent Spirits upon the Human 
Mind and Body," the first note of the temperance 
reformation. But Lyman Beecher did not speak un- 
til 1812. Then it was the amount of drinking at ordi- 
nations, '* sideboards smelling like the bar of a very 
active grog-shop " that awoke him to the war with 
alarm and shame and indignation. He was the chair- 
man of the committee that brought in the first report 
of the General Association against the evil. The pre- 
amble speaks of the '' undue consumption of ardent 
spirits, the enormous sacrifice of property resulting, 
the alarming increase of intemperance, the deadly ef- 
fect on health, the family, society, civil and religious 
institutions, and especially in nullifying the means of 
grace and destroying souls." 

The first recommendation was that all the ministers 
of the Association preach on the subject; the second 
that all abstain from the use of ardent spirits at ec- 
clesiastical meetings. The Massachusetts Temperance 



THE PULPIT AND SOCIAL WELFARE 253 

Society, the oldest meriting the name, was formed the 
year after, 1813. In the same year the Rev. Heman 
Humphrey of Fairfield, Connecticut, afterwards Pres- 
ident of Amherst, began publishing a series of articles 
on the subject, and Rev. Justin Edwards of Andover 
began preaching on it in 18 14. These are the pioneer 
temperance reformers, and the American pulpit has 
never since lacked a succession of fearless and effective 
preachers of this truth of social welfare. Lyman 
Beecher's six sermons on Intemperance given a little 
later were widely blessed to the reformation of men 
and the banishing of the cup from many circles. No- 
where have the evils of intemperance been made to pass 
before the eyes of men in more horrid array or the 
truth of the Gospel applied in more pungent way to 
present sin. 

The American pulpit at least in the first years of 
our national life was no less faithful as to the sin of 
negro slavery. As early as 1675 John Eliot, from the 
midst of his work among the Indians, *' warned the 
Government against the sale of Indians taken in war, 
on the ground that the selling of souls is dangerous 
merchandise, and with a bleeding and burning passion 
remonstrated against the abject condition of the en- 
slaved Africans." '* Cotton Mather in his * Essays 
to do good ' spoke of the injustice of slavery in such 
terms that his little book had to be expurgated by the 
American Tract Society to accommodate it to the de- 
generate conscience of a later day." The Mennonites 
of Germantown in 1688 urged the abolition of slavery 
in quaint and touching language. Every yearly meet- 
ing of Quakers uttered a unanimous protest. Even 
at the South the pulpit was not silent. The Meth- 
odists with their great strength there waged a spiritual 



254 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

warfare against the wrong. The southern Baptists 
in 1789 Resolved " That slavery is a violent depriva- 
tion of the rights of nature, and inconsistent with a 
Republican Governmen^t, and we therefore recom- 
mend it to our brethren to make use of every legal 
measure to extirpate this horrid evil from the land." 
At the North Edwards the younger is notable in the 
unbroken succession of anti-slavery ministers. His 
sermon on the *' Injustice and Impolicy of the Slave 
Trade " preached before the Connecticut Abolition 
Society in 1791 was printed for many years as the 
strongest argument against the whole system of slav- 
ery. Albert Barnes of our own church was outspoken 
against slavery, using the most masterly Biblical argu- 
ments, and in a way to reach the ear of the South. 
" His book on American slavery," says Austin Phelps, 
" was a thesaurus to the Abolitionists for many years. 
. . . He preached the substance of his book to his 
people at a time when millions of property sat along 
the aisles of his church, coined out of a slave-labor on 
cotton and rice plantations. He did it with the air 
of one who did not for a moment conceive it possible 
to do anything else. His more timid friends trembled 
for the result, but not he." 

Charles G. Finney, Lyman Beecher, William Leon- 
ard Bacon, Joseph P. Thompson, Richard S. Storrs 
have made noble pleas for the brotherhood of man. 
Horace Bushnell did not fear to preach politics in 
the pulpit. Men were measuring duty by apparent 
consequence and so fearing to say a word for the 
slave. But Bushnell maintained that righteousness 
secured the only consequences worth having. *' The 
principle he made underlay the anti-slavery movement, 
the resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law, the outcry 



THE PULPIT AND SOCIAL WELFARE 255 

of the North against Webster's Seventh of March 
speech, and entered into the thought that issued in the 
Free Soil party." The fertile imagination, the quick 
sympathies, the passionate earnestness of Henry Ward 
Beecher were all enlisted for the freedom of the slave. 

But in spite of fearless teaching slavery grew. It 
grew profitable and so strengthened by commercial 
interests its political policy. Gold covered the eye and 
closed the lips. It turned even good men into apol- 
ogists. It created the convenient doctrine that it was 
sacrilege to speak of slavery in the pulpit. Too many 
pulpits were silent, and too many churches partakers 
of the guilt. The violent speech of a few radical 
Abolitionists, the joining of obnoxious doctrines of 
free religion with anti-slavery made timid men cow- 
ards. There were conservative men who regarded all 
agitation as an irreverent forcing of Providence. 
When an earnest Christian lawyer at the time of John 
Brown's death offered resolutions at prayer meeting 
in the first church against slavery and praying for its 
speeding removal, a Professor of the Seminary op- 
posed the resolution in a speech in which he said that 
he had preached the Gospel for forty years and had 
found no need of bringing politics into the pulpit. 

While there were extremists on both sides, men who 
denounced the Church as in league with Satan and 
her ministers hirelings because they did not preach 
the duty of immediate emancipation, and men like 
President Lord of Dartmouth who wrote in defense 
of slavery as a divine institution, many pulpits were 
outspoken, speaking the truth in love. Such men as 
Channing and Beecher, great lovers of humanity, 
prophets of justice and brotherhood, gave strength to 
the ethical principles of the Gospel, trained the con- 



256 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

science of the nation to carry it through perilous years 
and the catastrophe of civil war. The closing words 
of one of Channing's addresses well represent the 
thought and spirit of the best pulpit as to the national 
sin. 

*' What is the duty of the North in regard to slav- 
ery? I recommend no crusade against slavery, no 
use of physical or legislative power for its destruction, 
no irruption into the South to tamper with the slave 
or to repeal or resist the laws. Our duties on this 
subject are plain. We must first free ourselves from 
all constitutional or legal obligations to uphold slavery. 
Then we must give free and strong expression to our 
reprobation of slavery. The North has but one 
weapon — moral force, the utterance of moral judg- 
ment, moral feeling and religious conviction. I do 
not say that this alone is to subvert slavery. Provi- 
dence never accomplishes its end by a single instru- 
ment. All social changes come from mixed motives, 
from various impulses, and slavery is to fall through 
various causes. But among these a high place will 
belong to the general conviction of its evils and wrongs. 
Opinion is stronger than kings, mobs, lynch laws, or 
any other laws for repressing thought and speech. . . . 

" I have turned aside to speak of the great stain upon 
our country which makes us the by-word and scorn 
of the nations; but I do not despair. Mighty powers 
are at work in the world. Who can stay them? 
God's word has gone forth and it cannot return to 
Him void. A new comprehension of the Christian 
Spirit, a new reverence for humanity, a new feeling 
of brotherhood, and of all men's relations to the com- 
mon Father — this is among the signs of our times. 
We see it : do we not feel it ? Before this all oppres- 



THE PULPIT AND SOCIAL WELFARE 257 

sions are to fall. Society, silently pervaded by this, 
is to change its aspect of universal warfare for peace. 
The power of selfishness, all-grasping and seemingly 
invincible, is to yield to this diviner energy. The 
Song of Angels * on earth peace/ will not always 
sound as fiction. O Come Thou Kingdom of heaven, 
for which we daily pray ! " 

The prayer was to be answered but not in the way 
of the asker. There had to be first a ** fiery Gospel, 
writ in burnished rows of steel." And when the trum- 
pet sounded, and the hearts of men were sifted, a 
million men were found ready to die to make men free, 
because Christ had died to make men holy. It is use- 
less to say that there might have been a more peaceful 
way if intemperate speech had been checked, and zeal 
never flamed into fanaticism. The stain was too deep, 
the wrong was too thoroughly ingrained in nature and 
institutions and selfish interests to take any but the 
costly way. And the nation was ready for the fiery 
trial because men in Christian pulpits like Mr. Beecher 
had applied Christianity to all the great ethical con- 
cerns of business and society. 

" The moment a man so conducts his profession 
that it touches the question of right and wrong, he 
comes into my sphere. There I stand; and I put 
God's measure, the golden reed of the Sanctuary, on 
him and his course; and I am his master, if I be a 
true seer and a true moral teacher." 

And this brings us to the practical question : What 
shall be our attitude to the social questions of our own 
day ? There are many who feel that they are the most 
difficult and vital problems with which Christianity 
has ever had to deal. 



2S8 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

Christianity is a practical religion. It makes its 
appeal to life and is tested by its practical effects in 
the individual and in society. There is an ethical side 
to every Gospel truth. It has been said that Chris- 
tianity unlike other religions and systems of ethics 
needs God and at least two men. The relation of these 
two men makes society. The relation to God is ex- 
pressed and realized in the relation of brothers. Only 
by being a brother can a man know himself as a son 
of God. '' He who says he loves God, and hates his 
brother is a liar.'' 

Christ taught and established a present Kingdom of 
God. Its motive is a filial spirit: its sphere is human 
life : its goal is to make the will of God done on earth 
as in heaven. 

** A fellowship of Christ — like love which is to in- 
clude every soul that is willing to enter ! A community 
which embraces every other true community of men, 
which contains and controls the home, the State, the 
economic system, the fellowships of science, letters, 
art." 

The neglect of Christian ethics by the pulpit, the 
failure to preach applied Christianity is seen in making 
the Christian life an intellectual assent or an emotional 
response and not the whole of character. 

In the undue emphasis of the God ward side, the 
manward side has been like a neglected garden rank 
with noisome weeds. Heresy in the New Testament 
is connected with conduct and not solely with intel- 
lectual conceptions. The most deadly heresies of life 
have grown up under the strictest preaching of so- 
called Gospel truths. Men may be sticklers for creed 
and careless of lives. The seventeenth century, called 
the cruel century, was also noted for its theological 



THE PULPIT AND SOCIAL WELFARE 259 

conflicts. And when men complain of the ethical 
teaching of the pulpit, and say — *' We don't want 
politics — we want the pure Gospel '' — it may be be- 
cause conscience is restless under it, bringing unpleas- 
antly to mind transactions and relations that cannot 
stand the pure eye of Christ. It is an easy matter 
for some to say, Lord, Lord, to assent to any form 
of sound doctrine, and even to become enthusiastic 
over watchw^ords of religion, but it is hard for all of 
us to do the will of our Father, '' to do justice and 
love mercy and walk humbly with our God." 

There is special need now for clear-eyed, brave- 
hearted prophets in the American pulpits, men who are 
not only lovers of the individual but who have the 
social passion and spiritual patriotism of Amos and 
Hosea, of Isaiah and Christ. 

We know something of the rapid and complex and 
even revolutionary changes that have affected the social 
and industrial life of our time. And yet we are too 
close to them to fully measure their significance or 
foresee their outcome. The late Dr. Henderson of 
Chicago University, a keen and sympathetic interpreter 
of social conditions, said before the world-war, ** We 
now live in the midst of a transformation more signifi- 
cant than the fall of the Roman Empire, the rise of 
modern nationalism or the Reformation.'' 

The war has revealed in a startling way the fact of 
social forces : it has not lessened their working or 
made more easy their interpretation. 

Invention applied to work and travel has made the 
centralization of industry and population in great cit- 
ies, the great and tragic contrasts of condition, such 
wealth and power and splendor as the world has never 
seen — and monotonous stretches of hopeless, sudden 



26o THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

poverty that mock our civilization and challenge the 
saving power of the Gospel. 

Business and industry have grown from the local 
to the national and the international, and great com- 
binations of men make the personal element less pos- 
sible, fix men in a system and lessen the sense of per- 
sonal responsibility for imperfect and unjust condi- 
tions. Not infrequently the wrong spirit towards men 
deadens or embitters the hearts of multitudes and 
raises a barrier directly athwart the path of the Gospel. 

The new conditions of industry but partly Chris- 
tianized are aggravated by unassimilated masses of 
Old World peoples with their various and conflicting 
ideals that threaten our simple and pure ideas of wor- 
ship, of the day of rest, of the family, of recreation 
and of democracy itself. 

With the growth of society and the increase of 
wealth, the separation of men in classes appears. So- 
cial unity is lessened, spiritual standards are weakened, 
it becomes more difficult to permeate the mass of men 
with Christian faith. 

Every question to-day is a social question. No 
truth deals with the man alone: every truth goes 
through the individual to his place and work in the 
world and his relationship to other lives. 

The pulpit must be true to the Gospel of Christ in 
the light of present conditions. Loyalty to Christ 
means no less than the application of his principles 
to present issues, the carrying out of the law of re- 
demption to its utmost social implications. 

Social principles are involved in every truth of the 
Gospel. They must be taught to form the ethical 
standards of men and a righteous public opinion. 

In this way shall leaders be called and trained in the 



THE PULPIT AND SOCIAL WELFARE 261 

social conscience, that evils may be removed and just 
and humane conditions established. 

And this is necessary to give the true goal and the 
sufficient motive to all social service. It must be con- 
nected with the power that makes a new life. 

It is a difficult time for the preacher to live and 
speak the fullest truth. Position and power must not 
cover his eyes or put a gag upon his lips. It requires 
wise men, loving men, fearless men; men who love 
their fellows too well to keep a guilty silence in the 
presence of evil; men who believe in Christ and his 
Kingdom too profoundly to be disturbed by the tem- 
porary triumphs of evil and the slow progress of 
righteousness. 

We have such men in the pulpit. There might be 
more, but there are enough to show the Spirit of the 
Church. The divine fire is touching the conscience 
of our best preachers. The social program of our 
federated churches shows the way that Christian 
thought is pointing. 

The recent appeal of a group of the finest ministers 
of New York City for the spirit of order, of calm- 
ness and fairness, for the basic rights of the Republic 
of free speech and free press within reasonable limits, 
and the leaving to the constituted authorities the con-. 
trol of anti-social forces, was a brave expression of 
spiritual vision. 

Let me give you two examples of this prophetic 
speaking of the Social Gospel. 

I quote first from the sermon of the late Bishop 
Henry C. Potter of New York at the dedication of 
Grace Chapel, East 14th Street. 

'* The growth of wealth and luxury — wicked, 
wasteful and wanton, as before God I declare that 



262 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

luxury to be — has been matched step by step by a 
deadening and deepening poverty which has left whole 
neighborhoods of people practically without hope and 
without aspiration. At such a time for the Church of 
God to sit still and be content with theories of its 
duty outlawed by time and long ago demonstrated to 
be grotesquely inadequate to the demands of a living 
situation, this is to deserve the scorn of men and the 
curse of God ! Take my word for it, men and breth- 
ren, unless you and I and all men who have any life 
or stewardship of talents or means, of whatever sort, 
are willing to get up out of our sloth and ease and 
selfish dilettanteism of service, and get down among 
the people who are battling amid their poverty and 
ignorance — young girls for their chastity, young men 
for their better ideal of righteousness, old and young 
alike for one clear ray of the immortal courage and 
the immortal hope — then verily the Church in its 
stately splendor, its Apostolic orders, its venerable rit- 
ual, its decorous and dignified conventions, is revealed 
as simply a monstrous and insolent impertinence/* 

The second extract is from a well-known Baptist 
preacher of the Central West, now a professor of 
preaching at the University of Chicago. 

** I believe in the Golden Rule of Jesus, a man says. 
Not a bad first article for any man's faith, if he really 
believes it. 

*' Let him say it over to himself very thoughtfully 
and see if he means it. ' I believe that babies every- 
where should be as well born and kindly tended as I 
would have my own; that motherhood should be as 
protected as I would have the mother that is dearest 
to me; that childhood should be as joyous and youth 
as free to come to its own as mine should be if I 



THE PULPIT AND SOCIAL WELFARE 263 

could have my wish; that womanhood should be 
guarded everywhere with the chivalry that I would 
give my best ; that every man's labor should be as hon- 
ored and as fairly estimated as I want mine to be; 
that all lives should be lightened and blessed with the 
leisure that I love for myself ; that the higher human 
values for which I crave should be available for all 
mankind; that every man's future should be cared 
for as I would have my own; and that every one 
everywhere should have the love and kindly esteem 
and generous appreciation that I desire so keenly for 
myself/ Loving men whom he has seen is an element 
of the religious experience, even though as yet he may 
not know God whom he has not seen." ^ Where will 
you find a more simple and complete interpretation of 
the law of love ! 

The American pulpit has grown in humanness, in 
social understanding and sympathy and so in reality. 
Such sermons are a prophecy of the renewed leader- 
ship of the American pulpit and its more vital influ- 
ence on the questions and movements of social well- 
being. 

^ " University of Chicago Sermons," p. 318. 



XII 

THE PUIPIT AND THE NATION 

The Pulpit has been a chief force in the higher life 
of the nation. 



Let the facts of our history tell their own story. 
America was thought out and planned in the atmos- 
phere of a Christian church. It's beginning was the 
most golden romance outside the Bible. It was a new 
book of Genesis. This New World was dedicated to 
the proposition that Christ's will is the only w^orthy 
and wholesome law for the State. The Pilgrim 
Church created the Pilgrim State and drew up in the 
cabin of the Mayflower " the first instrument confer- 
ring equal civil and religious rights on every member 
of the Commonwealth." 

The influence of the pulpit in the early New Eng- 
land colonies is unmistakable. Roger Williams and 
Rhode Island are one. When John Milton was mak- 
ing his great plea for civil liberty, Roger Williams, 
his contemporary, went far beyond him in his plea 
for soul liberty. He taught us America's greatest 
contribution to civilization, a free church in a free 
State. And Thomas Hooker did as much for Con- 
necticut. His thought is in every line of the Consti- 
tution which has been the model for so many other 
States until John Fiske calls him the ** Father of 
American Democracy." 

264 



THE PULPIT AND THE NATION 265 

, With the broadening of the century, the coming of 
new peoples, the conquest of nature, the development 
of varied life, other interests besides the Church came 
to their rightful place. The ministry could not keep 
the same relative position. Yet Jonathan Edwards 
stands as the chief figure of eighteenth century Amer- 
ica. We can never estimate his influence on national 
life. It is felt in literature and art, in science and 
political economy and lives in the social movements of 
our day. 

When we think of the nineteenth century America, 
what names come crowding upon the page ! Thinkers 
and poets, statesmen and inventors, soldiers and mer- 
chants. Mr. Carnegie has given his list of the twenty 
greatest names of our English race and they are largely 
iron-masters! If we could really analyze the forces 
that make us great as a nation, we should never leave 
out the moral and spiritual. In the first half of the 
nineteenth century, no man more fully and energet- 
ically embodied these forces than Lyman Beecher. He 
was no less a national figure than Daniel Webster. 
By his sermons, his lectures, his pamphlets he tried to 
keep the pioneer, progressive spirit of the nation Chris- 
tian. 

It is no harder to find the preacher's place in the 
second half of the century. In the crisis of our na- 
tional life, we instinctively think of one name. And 
his fame grows with the years. But in the staff 
around Lincoln, '* the first American," no one wrought 
more nobly than Henry Ward Beecher. He laid the 
golden reed of the Sanctuary upon every question 
that came into the field of morals. In the darkest 
hour Lincoln sent him to England to interpret the 
struggle of a free people. His speeches at Liverpool, 



266 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

Manchester, Birmingham, are our highest examples of 
inspired oratory. They awakened the conscience of 
England and prevented the Government from recog- 
nizing the Southern Confederacy. 

Very different but no less noble was the influence 
of Phillips Brooks. In the darkest hour of the Civil 
War, he set his great manhood to the task of inter- 
preting the spiritual meaning of the nation. In varied 
and speaking symbol and with passionate earnestness 
he spoke of the nation as the corporate life of the 
people, the sphere of the highest manhood, the agent 
of the divine purpose. He lifted the contest above the 
mists and confusions of parties, where the people could 
see the great issues at stake, the principles of justice 
and humanity and brotherhood. He made the people 
feel that the cause of the Union was the cause of God. 

These are great names, ranking with the highest in 
any calling. But the same truth holds of the rank and 
file of the pulpit. We could not live without the truths 
they declare. We could not grow in worth without 
the ideals they represent. As Mr. Wilson said at 
Carlisle, England, in the church once served by his 
maternal grandfather, '* From such quiet places as 
these go forth influences that bless the life of the na- 
tion.'^ 



It is well to go deeper if we can and ask — In what 
way has the pulpit contributed to the higher life of the 
nation ? 

It has made for social unity. It has brought peo- 
ple together under the highest motives for worship and 
service. In a democracy whose weakness is always 
jack of authority and obedience, in this western, 



THE PULPIT AND THE NATION 2.(yj 

world whose very air and opportunity breed extreme 
individualism, the pulpit by personal influence and 
teaching has brought diverse peoples and traditions 
into such vital contact as to make possible the growth 
of strong public opinion and cooperation for common 
interests. It has worked for that unity of thought 
and spirit that has made possible the expression of 
a common life. 

The pulpit has made for moral order and growth. 
The real foes of the nation, as in Tennyson's picture 
of King Arthur's realm, are within and not on the 
border. They are the selfish passions of men that 
demand freedom though others are enslaved thereby 
and society is disintegrated. 

How should personal vengeance yield to law ? How 
should men learn to secure redress for wrong by or- 
derly process of the State? I have told how young 
Lyman Beecher so spoke as to rouse the conscience 
of thQ people and make the duel a hated thing. 

It was the same brave voice that spoke against the 
evils of strong drink, and began the process of educa- 
tion and legislation for temperance, the most important 
social reform. It was Dr. Channing who first pointed 
out the relation between intemperance and industrial 
and home conditions and gave the temperance reform 
its larger vision. 

And the pulpit had to do with the removal of a 
social wrong eating at the very heart of the Republic. 
A democracy based on the doctrine of freedom and 
equality before the law, yet holding men as chattels! 
The country, as Lincoln said, could not long remain 
half slave and half free. The struggle was inevi- 
table. 

All churches condemned slavery at first. But it be- 



268 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

came so interwoven with society and prosperity that 
even good men were blinded and apologized for the 
evil. 

'' Many there were who made great haste and sold 
Unto the cunning enemy their swords/' 

But there were enough prophets in our pulpit, men 
like Channing, Bushnell, Beecher, to hold God's plumb 
line against our social institutions and convince the na- 
tion of its sin. So men were ready to pay the utmost 
price for a purified nation. 

The pulpit has made for intelhgent citizenship. It 
is the doctrine of the Republic that every child is to 
be educated as a potential citizen. But the child has 
this dignity because the Christian pulpit has taught 
the worth and sacredness of human life. The frontis- 
piece of the old New England speller had a church, 
and nearby a school house, a mill and a farmer plow- 
ing his field. Three centuries of our history are in 
that picture. Our schools and colleges began in reli- 
gion and the ministers were largely the founders and 
teachers. Our education has passed largely beyond 
the Church, but it still remains true that the teaching 
of the pulpit everywhere supports the schools of the 
people and awakens in our youth the desire for higher 
training. 

And finally the pulpit has made for a spiritual con- 
ception of the national life. It was religion that gave 
us our national life. Our fathers had never revolted 
save for the great religious awakening that just pre- 
ceded the Revolution. Society and business did not 
want the revolt. But it was the inevitable step of the 
awakened democracy, the common man asserting his 
right because he had found his soul. 



THE PULPIT AND THE NATION 269 

And at a later day when the question was whether 
the nation was a mere compact of States to be broken 
at will, or a life that was to be inviolate, it was reli- 
gion that gave the worthy conception of the State, and 
nerved the arm to maintain it. Dr. Mulford's ** Na- 
tion " gave statesmen the true political philosophy and 
voiced the impulse of marching thousands. What was 
the nation? The highest expression of the corporate 
life of the people, an organ of the Kingdom of God. 
It was organic and what God had joined man had no 
right to put asunder. And it was religious, to carry 
out God's purpose of good for all men. It found its 
wealth not in houses and lands, in factories and rail- 
ways, but (in the words of Ruskin) *' in as many as 
possible full-breathed, happy hearted human crea- 
tures.'' It is the popular expression of the democracy 
of Christ. 

I am sure that I have not over-emphasized the in- 
fluence of the pulpit in our national life. Great 
statesmen often recognize the value of spiritual lead- 
ers. *' We politicians," said Mr. Lloyd George, the 
English Premier, '' only touch the fringes of life ; but 
the ministry deal with the real problems of life, death 
and the hereafter." The pulpit is dealing with spirit- 
ual forces often unseen and unmeasured. And we 
are often dazzled by the men who live in the eye of 
the world. But long after the world's captains with 
their drums and guns are silent and the noisy poli- 
ticians of the day have been forgotten, will the quiet, 
unselfish men who have taught the truths of character 
and social well-being in their pulpit ministrations and 
in their daily walk and conversation as they went in 
and out of the homes of their parishioners, be regarded 
as the nation's real benefactors. 



270 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 



And what can be said of the present-day pulpit? 
Is it a commanding and controlHng voice in our na- 
tional life? 

The first year of our entrance into the war a clever 
writer sharply arraigned the pulpit for its ignorance 
or indifference to the great questions involved. While 
the press was aflame with discussion, while public men 
and educators were alive to the issue and trying in 
every way to arouse the spirit of America, the men 
in the pulpits held aloof, absorbed in their own work, 
unmindful of their prophetic leadership, content to 
warm themselves by ecclesiastical fires while their mas- 
ter was being crucified afresh by the world. Such was 
the charge. Was it true? There was enough truth 
to disturb a few hypersensitive souls. But the ma- 
jority of the pulpit did not recognize themselves in the 
picture. 

It is true that only a few of our pulpits sounded the 
trumpet call to arms. 

There were many preachers of foreign birth, who 
while loyal to America still cherished precious memories 
of other lands and could not bear the thought of their 
adopted country lifting up hands against their kindred. 
It speaks well for the influence of America, and of 
the receptiveness and appreciation of these new peo- 
ples, that so few of their ministers were disloyal, that 
so many pulpits were outspoken and that where they 
did not have the heart to speak, they suffered in si- 
lence. 

It must be remembered that the war was a rude and 
cruel shattering of our ideals, that no thoughtful man 
could enter it with a light heart. It was thought that 



THE PULPIT AND THE NATION 271 

the wonderful progress of the world made for peace. 
Discovery and invention, industry and commerce had 
brought the nations together. The most notable fact 
of the generation had been the growth of race unity. 
The widespread interest in social welfare, the mission- 
ary movement that had touched every known land had 
given hope of an era of peace and good will. Even 
the increase of armaments and the fear of gathering 
armies was stilled by the assurance that they were 
not for war but to guard the peace of the world. In 
spite of previous warnings, until the last moment, the 
leaders of the nations did not believe war possible. It 
came as a terrible shock to our Christian pulpit. How 
could the teachings and hopes of a lifetime be re- 
versed! How could they see God on the field when 
the bars of the jungle were let down. What could 
they say? Many were dumbfounded. They were lit- 
erally dumb before the Lord. They said with the 
Psalmist, '' I opened not my mouth, because Thou didst 
it." 

Then many of our best men, especially those of so- 
cial vision, who knew history and modern life, who 
could trace back to the causes of war, who knew that 
the rivalries and aggressions of nations were largely 
for new markets, could not feel at once that the issue 
was so clear cut, that it was all black and all white, 
autocracy against democracy. They saw the most 
cruel dominion of modern times — Russia — on the 
side of the Allies. They saw our own nation made 
up of polyglot peoples with divided loyalties, the need 
of an unmistakable cause and a single united purpose 
before we should ignore our traditional American po- 
sition and throw the force of the nation into the world- 
combat. It is no wonder that some of the best men 



2^2 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

hesitated. I have spoken so fully because we must 
do justice to their motives. History, written not with 
passion but with calmness and fairness, will justify 
their sincerity and loyalty. 

Still other pulpits felt that their best service to the 
nation was not in discussion of national questions but 
in interpreting the great facts of God and the spiritual 
life from which the renewal of all life comes, that 
idealism and endurance, that loyalty and heroism that 
make a nation great. When the committee on Social 
Service of the Presbyterian Church went to the White 
House with the question — '* What can we do to help 
the nation in this day of struggle? " — Mr. Wilson an- 
swered unhesitatingly, ** You can best serve the nation 
by keeping the religious life of the churches at the 
full." This lesson was first learned by the English 
and Scotch pulpit. 

The early months of the war saw a great moral 
awakening. All peoples felt it. The call of country, 
the demands of sacrifice, the uncertainties of the fu- 
ture all called out latent nobility and fixed the thoughts 
upon something higher than gain or pleasure. Words- 
worth's words seemed true again. 

France seemed standing on the top of golden hours 
And Europe born again. 

The pulpit felt the spiritual wave and tried to di- 
rect and strengthen it. Patriotism seemed identical 
with religion, and the sermon was the eflfort to inter- 
pret the contest in which the nation was engaged. But 
the pulpit soon passed to deeper needs. Men felt the 
perils to the religious life in war, however necessary 
and holy the cause. They saw the wasting effects 



THE PULPIT AND THE NATION 273 

upon the higher Hfe of the people, the terrible losses 
that made the days gray and comfortless, that turned 
so many lives into reckless denial or dumb despair. 

With this deeper vision of human need, the pulpit 
turned the thoughts of the people to God, to the truths 
and duties of the religious life. One of the notable 
volumes of sermons during the war was by W. P. 
Paterson, Professor of Theology in the University of 
Edinburgh. It is called '' In the Day of the Ordeal," 
and is dedicated " To my wife and in memory of our 
sons: R. S. Paterson, 2nd Lieutenant Royal Field Ar- 
tillery, Neuve Chapelle, nth of March, 191 5; W. P. 
Paterson, Captain King's Own Scottish Borderers, 
Deville Wood, 31st July, 191 6." 

There is the very flower of his house cut down in 
its youth. And what does the great father say when 
he preached the Gospel ? 

There is the greatest economy of personal reference. 
He turns from his own bitter sorrow to the Eternal 
God. How shall he comfort men? How shall he 
inspire them to the life of sons? He speaks of the 
way of God with the nation and the social mission of 
the Church, but the great messages are deeply spirit- 
ual. The Magnetism of the Cross, Free Grace, Re- 
pentance, Reverence, the Quest of Tranquillity. 

I have said all this to form some background, some 
standard by which to measure our own pulpit. 

I feel that the American pulpit as a whole was true 
to its great religious obligations. There were men 
who were restless and unsettled, without vision and 
without faith. But the best men held themselves all 
the more firmly to their tasks. Their gospel came not 
in word only but in power. They sent forth their 
choicest youth with consecration to their high calling 



274 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

and they sustained the weary and the lonely with the 
ministration of spiritual friendship. 

They taught the sacredness of the nation's life and 
helped the new Americans to answer the country's 
call in the spirit of loyal sons. They interpreted the 
meaning of the struggle in terms of the Kingdom of 
God. They called for gifts of money and the far 
richer gifts of life on the plea of the world's need and 
the ideal of an unselfish service. Here and there a 
sensational pulpit detailed the atrocities of the Ger- 
mans, supping full with horrors, and even after the 
armistice there were preachers who proclaimed the 
Gospel of hate, but they were very few. The Amer- 
ican pulpit as a whole was loyal to Christ in express- 
ing the lesser loyalty to a Government. That was a 
fine pledge that the Y. M. C. A. presented to all the 
men of the officers' training camps, *' We undertake 
to maintain our part of the war free from hatred, 
brutality or graft, true to the American purpose and 
Ideals." And the fact that our soldiers and sailors 
and airmen have come home, and so glad to get home 
and be quickly absorbed in the nation's work and life, 
so many with noble record and unsullied name, is due 
in large part to the teaching of our Christian pulpit 
and to the efforts that Christian men and women made 
to keep the morale of our forces and the soul of the 
nation. 



In the first year of the war Mr. Elihu Root made 
an address at the opening of Hamilton College, in 
which he said, '' No man can know the future. But 
it is certain that we are on the eve of a new day. 
Great and far-reaching events will take place what- 



THE PULPIT AND THE NATION 275 

ever the issue — the world will not be the same after 
the war." And he urged the young men to that life 
of reverence and fidelity and idealism that would pre- 
pare them to take their place in the new world. 

I know there are many who now say, where is the 
new world? and they are busy in trying to make the 
glory of the morning fade into the light of common 
day. They think, and they try to make other people 
think — We are in the same old world. 

But however invisible and immeasurable the forces, 
unless the lessons of history are no guide, we are in 
the beginning of a new era. And what shall the pul- 
pit do to help America take its place in the life of the 



race 



? 



The pulpit can teach a true patriotism. It must be 
spiritual, not commercial, not what we can get out of 
America, but how can America help to the best man- 
hood and womanhood. All sorts of organizations 
from political parties to Rotary clubs are calling upon 
the people to preserve American ideals. And they 
often mean something fixed and final, the past to 
be reared into a monument, not the seed of a growing 
life. 

The pulpit can take the ideals of the fathers, the 
truths for which Lincoln stood, the kind of democracy 
that he embodied, and apply them to the life and prob- 
lems of our -own time. 

The pulpit must stand for the just authority of the 
State. Every nation feels the effects of the violent 
revolutions of Central and Eastern Europe. There 
are idealists who would overthrow the existing order 
of society. And there are evil, bitter men who are 
foes of all order. A spark may start a conflagration. 
There can be no liberty without order, without self- 



276 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

restraint, without subjection of personal desires to the 
expressed will of the people. 

But mob rule is only another kind of anarchy. The 
suppression of free speech because it is critical of 
existing institutions and conditions and would change 
them by changing public opinion, the using of force 
to keep things as they are, may violate the simplest 
rights of the Republic and is the sure way to increased 
unrest and violence. Suppressed rights are sure to 
become volcanic. 

The pulpit by its quietness, its tolerance, its faith in 
democracy, can do much to subdue the passions of the 
day, remove suspicion and enmity, the worst vestige 
of war, increase the social outlook, and so a willing 
obedience to law, as the bond of brotherhood. 

We have multitudes of peoples with us and yet not 
of us, practically aliens, unassimilated elements in our 
national life. If they find a happy life here, they 
learn to love the land and are as loyal as any Amer- 
ican who traces his ancestry from Plymouth Rock. 
If they are despised, exploited, denied the standards 
of decent living they become our dynamite. 

A nation is made by the growth of common ideals; 
never by the imposition of a single language or po- 
litical system. ** Rewlutionary radicalism will fall 
of its own weight," said Mr. Hoover, " as we remove 
the spirit of caste and give to every man a fair 
chance." 

And the pulpit can do no better work for the nation 
than to teach the true attitude towards these new peo- 
ples and help them to take their place as true Ameri- 
cans. It means that the pulpit teaches the true stand- 
ard of individual worth. 

The individual man is having a new value set upon 



THE PULPIT AND THE NATION 277 

him in this western world. The demands of national 
life shook us out of our smug content and our social 
satisfaction. Every man is of value to the national 
life. The draft recognized his worth and searched 
him out. It was not the name he bore or the lan- 
guage he spoke, not the size of the check he could 
draw or the Church to which he belonged, but the 
simple question of his manhood, his physical and moral 
worth, what he could contribute individually to the 
national force. 

Men from every class and race and work stood 
side by side, in a new sense of value, in the light of 
the new duty. A revolution took place, a lifting up 
of the first things of life. It has immense significance 
for our national life and the greatest encouragement 
and lesson for our own life. 

There are still people who capitalize their patriotism, 
who wrap the flag about them to hide their bulging 
pockets. But thank God! we are not sunk in ma- 
terialism. We have not lost our sense of real values. 
Gifts are oflfered with lavish abundance. One of our 
ministers asks of his church an offering of $3,000 for 
the Armenian relief, and $8,000 overflow the collec- 
tion plates. 

All this is an indication of personal values, it is 
placing the man before his things. The fact that the 
soul of man is alive, that there is this great response 
to higher values, is no doubt due in large part to the 
teaching of the Christian pulpit. The soul of Amer- 
ica is alive because its religious life is so pervasive. 
It took a crisis to bring it out. It cheers us to show 
that the work of the pulpit has not been in vain. It 
points out our unmistakable task, to so present the 
truths and life of Christianity that they shall make 



278 THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

their supreme demand. The call of country cannot 
be higher than the Kingdom of God. 

And finally, it is the work of the pulpit to lift up 
the Christian ideals for which the war was fought. 
They are the ideals of justice and brotherhood, and 
so ideals of peace. ** I hate war," said a distinguished 
English General, '* I love peace and home and family, 
but we are in this great cause and we must fight it 
out to the end." " This is a war against war," said 
General Smuts of South Africa. There can be no 
compensation for the measureless sacrifice save in a 
new era of human rights and good will and peace. 
The Christian pulpit must see to it that the ideal is 
not dimmed or diminished. Other voices are calling 
to us. Lower conceptions are being urged as the only 
way of the race. A well-known judge says, '' There 
is no such thing as International Law. The Christian 
law may work between man and man. But now we 
know that the relations of nations can only be gov- 
erned by force." With one hand he called upon the 
God of Christ and with the other he opened the bars 
of the jungle. A group of men at a great University 
talk about the relation of the United States and Japan. 
After this war, shall we be able to maintain friendly 
relations with the ambitious leader of the Orient? 
And their conclusion is baldly and coldly stated, that 
peace in the Pacific depends upon our keeping up a 
great navy and a powerful standing army. 

Shall the future welfare of the race depend upon 
militarism ? Shall we say that the hope of poets and 
prophets is but the dream of mad enthusiasts? Shall 
might — not love — be the law of life? Shall John 
Galsworthy's word be true that after this war ** the 



THE PULPIT AND THE NATION 279 

dogmas of Christianity shall be found shot through 
and through ? '* 

It is for the pulpit to say whether Christ has abdi- 
cated, whether our Gospel has the power of personal 
and national renewal. 

The question is: Shall the idealism that carried 
our nation into the war be continued through the far 
more important and difficult process of peace? Hav- 
ing put our hands to the plow, shall we turn back? 
Having forgotten an exclusive and isolated national- 
ism, and given the world an example of disinterested 
service shall we now think solely or chiefly of our- 
selves. Shall it be America first, and America for 
Americans? Shall we practically say. Every nation 
for itself, and the devil take the hindermost? It is 
incredible and it must be made impossible. A selfish, 
narrow nationalism is no better than a selfish, narrow 
individualism. A League of Nations is the noblest 
conception the world has seen. It seems necessary 
to the peace of the world. It is the organized ex- 
pression of the good will of the world and it may be 
the agent of the very Kingdom of God. 

There may be honest difference of opinion as to 
particular features of a proposed League of Nations. 
There is little difference of opinion among men of 
world-wide and Christian temper as to its need and 
possible blessing. And here the pulpit of America 
is practically united. Upon no other public question 
has there been such unanimity. The best preachers 
of America have spoken in no uncertain tones. 

The first year of the war, the Reverend William 
Temple of St. James' Church, Piccadilly, London, son 
of the former master of Rugby and the Archbishop 
of Canterbury, made a notable address on the Spirit- 



28o THE PULPIT AND AMERICAN LIFE 

ual Call of the War. He said the issue of the war 
was between nationalism that owned no law save its 
own interest, and something higher. The reality 
higher than the nation was the Kingdom of God. 
Only as we live in the light of this great vision, and 
interpret our national life in harmony with this pur- 
pose of God shall we be teachers of a true patriotism. 
The nation can be truly great only as a part of the 
Kingdom of God. 

In St. John's vision of a future society, the test is 
a golden reed, ** according to the measure of a man, 
that is an angel." The Christian ideal is the pattern 
after which we must build every social and national 
structure. 



INDEX 



Abbott, Lyman, 236 
Adams, John, 250 
Allen, A. V. G., 19 
Asbury, Francis, 203 
Authority, 275 

Bacon, Leonard, 252 
Bacon, William Leonard, 254 
Bancroft, George, 19 
Barnes, Albert, 220, 254 
Bartol, James A., 200 
Beecher, Henry Ward, blend- 
ing of contradictions. 



43; Catherine Beecher, 44; 
woodbee, 45; Boston, 46; 
Cincinnati, 46 ; theological 
contests, 48-49 ; infidelity, 
49; the standing order, 50; 
Unitarianism, 51 ; influence 
on American life, 53; ser- 
mons and addresses, 55-6; 
physical vitality, 57-8; in- 
tellectual and spiritual, 59- 
60; Mrs. Stowe, 60; the 
preacher, 62-8; defender of 
historic faith, 179-80, 252, 
107-8; four elements of na- 254, 265 
ture and early training. Black, Hugh, 235 
109-11; influence of nature, Blair, James, 209 
112-3; training in the Bogardus, 3 
schools, 114; elocution, Bradford, Amory Howe, 185 
115,; mathematics, 116; Brent, Bishop, 235 
physiology, 117; early reli- Broadus, John A., 190 



gious experience, 117; vi- 
sion of Christ, 118; Law- 
rencdburg, Ind., 120; In- 
dianapolis, 121 ; studies, 
122; Plymouth church, 123; 
sermons, 123-4; speeches in 
Great Britain, 125 ; writ- 
ings, 125; trial, 125-6; 
thought of his last years, 
126 ; characteristics as 
preacher, 127-9, 213 
Beecher, Lyman, three fold 
value of his life, 40; East 
Hampton, 41 ; Litchfield, 



281 



Brooks, Phillips, early life, 
130-2; words of Arthur 
Brooks, 132; loyalty, 133; 
Trinity Church, Boston, 
134; lectures at Yale, 135; 
sermons in England, 136: 
public service, 136; minis- 
try to young men, 136-7; 
the people's minister, 137-8; 
Bishop, 138-40; a nation 
mourns, 140-1 ; elements 
of greatness, 141-44; 
speaking, 145 ; message, 
146; essentialness of the 



282 



INDEX 



Gospel, 146-9; sonship of 
man, 150; optimism, 15 1-2, 
266 

Brown, Charles Reynolds, 235 

Buck, Richard, 2 

Bushnell, Horace, country- 
life, 87-^89 ; independence, 
89; explorer, 90; self-por- 
trait, 91 ; early religious ex- 
perience, 92 ; doubt, 93 ; re- 
newed faith, 94; stages of 
experience, 97-8 ; atone- 
ment, 96; power-value of 
experience, 97-8 ; prayers, 
99 ; sermons, loo-i ; viril- 
ity, 1 01 ; imagination, 102-3 ; 
style, 103; in the pulpit, 
105 ; influence, 105 ; mediat- 
ing thinker, 180-1, 254 

Byington — " Puritan in Eng- 
land and N. E.," 246 



Cadman, S. Parkes, 235 
Canning, Stratford, 213 
Carnegie, Andrew, 216 
Cartwright, Peter, the cir- 
cuit-rider, 204; and Lincoln, 
204 
Channing, William Ellery, 
early forces, 72-74; growth 
of thought, 75 ; preacher, 
77-8; style, 79; message, 
80 ; conception of Jesus, 
80-1 ; limitation, 81 ; theo- 
logical influence, 82; ethi- 
cal, 83 ; temperance and 
anti-slavery, 84, 256, 267 
Church and State in early N. 

E., 243 
Citizenship, 268 



Clarke, James Freeman, of 
the older school, 199; 
"Ten Great Religions," 200 
Clay, Henry, 252 
Coffin, Henry Sloane, 236 
Collyer, Robert, 201-2 
Cotton, John, 8, 12, 176, 244 
Coxe, Arthur Cleveland, 216 
Criticism of the pulpit, 237 
Cuyler, Theodore L., 222 

Davenport, John, 7, 8, 177 
Davis, Samuel, influence on 

Patrick Henry, 10, 220 
Democrats, 249 
Doyle, Father, 224 
Duff, Alexander, 213 
Dwight, Timothy, progress 

of the clergyman, 9-10; 

first notable preacher of 

the national life, 177-8 

Education, minister's place in, 
9 

Edwards, Jonathan, European 
Contemporaries, 20-1 ; in- 
fluence of Locke, 22; his 
idealism, 22 ; resolutions, 
23; habits of work, 23; 
ascetic, 24; mystic, 25; 
diary, 25; person, 26; 
message, 27 ; philosophy, 
2y; God, 27; man, 28; re- 
generation, 29; manner, 30; 
style, 31; extracts, 33; ap- 
peal to fear, 33; poetic ele- 
ments, 34; effect of ser- 
mons, 36-7; prophetic ele- 
ment, 38; notable figure of 
the i8th century, 177, 265 

Edwards, Justin, 253 



INDEX 



283 



Eliot, John, apostle to the In- 
dians, 177, 253 

Evangelism, old and new, 
three stages, 154; past and 
present, 163 ; organization 
of modern, 164; individual- 
ism, 168; pastoral, 169 

Fairbairn, A. M., *' Prophets 
of the Christian, Faith," 19, 
20 

Federalists, 249 

Finney, Charles G., religious 
experience, 155; character- 
istics of preaching, 156; 
lawyer's habit of analysis, 
158; appeal to conscience, 
158; personality, 159; influ- 
ence, 160, 254 

Fiske, John, 246 

Fitch, Albert Parker, 235 

Fosdick, Henry Emerson, 236 

Frothingham, O. B. and the 
N. E. churches, 191 

Gage, General, 247 
George, Lloyd, 269 
Gibbons, Cardinal, 224 
Gladden, Washington, 185 
Goodell, Charles H., 236 
Goodell, Constans L., 182 
Gordon, George A., 19, 229, 

236 
Gordon, William, 248 
Green, John R., 5 
Greer, Bishop David H., 231 

Hale, Edward Everett, 200 
Hall, John, 221 
Hamilton, Alexander, 249, 
251 



Hamilton College, 274 
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 5 
Heacock, Grosvenor, 222 
Henry, Patrick, 220 
Henson, Canon Hensley, lit- 
urgy and preaching, 209 
Henson, P. S., 190 
Hillis, Dwight N., 236 
Hitchcock, Roswell D., 221 
Hodges, Geo., 229 
Holmes, John Haynes, 236 
Holmes, Wm. V. V., 236 
Hooker, Thomas, 14, 177, 245, 

264 
Hopkins, Samuel, 177 
Hoyt, Wayland, 190 
Humphrey, Heman, 253 
Hunt, Robert, 2 

Ideals of the Sermon, 228 

Idealism, 279 

Indians, 253 

Individual, new value of, 

Ireland, Archbishop, 224 

Jackson, Andrew, 252 

Jacobin, 250 

Jefferson, Charles E., 229, 
'2'Z^-Z, 235 

Johnson, Samuel, first Presi- 
dent of King's College, 211 

Kelman, John, 236 
Kingdom of God, 280 
King's Chapel, 244 
Kirke, Dr., of Baltimore, 235, 

236 
Knapp, Jacob, 188 

League of nations, 279 



284 



INDEX 



Lee, Bishop, 212 
Lincoln, Abraham, 265, 267 
Lord, President, 255 
Lorimer, Geo. A., 190 

Madison, James, 249 
MacColl, Alexander, 2Z^ 
McConnell, Bishop, 208, 235 
McConnell, S. D., 209 
McDowell, Bishop, 208, 235 
Mcllvaine, Charles Pettit, 
211-13; picture by Bishop 
Lee, 212; words of arch- 
bishop of Canterbury, 214 

McGlynn, Father, 224 

Makemie, Francis, 4, 246 

Manning, Jacob M., 183 

Martineau, James, the new 
orthodoxy, 82 

Mason, John M., 220 

Mather, Cotton, the magnalia, 
II ; sermons, 15, 177 

Mather, Increase, 244 

Mennonites, 253 

Merrill, William L., 236 

Michaelius, 3 

Milton, John, 264 

Moody, Dwight L., source of 
message, 161 ; message com- 
pared with Finney, 162; ef- 
fect on the churches, 163; 
the enquiry room, 164 

Moravians, 245 

Mulford, Elisha, 269 

Munger, T. T., 185 

Nation, Pulpit and, 264 
National life, spiritual con- 
ception of, 268 
Newton, Richard, 216 



Nott, Eliphalet, 251 

Olin, Stephen, 206 
Order and Growth, 267 

Paine, Thomas, 250 
Parks, Leighton, 229, 234 
Parker, Theodore, extreme 
protestant, 192; Moral sen- 
sitiveness, 193-4 ; cardinal 
points of his faith, 194; 
master of literatures, 195; 
spirituality, 196 ; thinker 
not orator, 197; ethical 
message, 198 
Parkhurst, Charles H., 230, 

235 

Paterson, W. P., 273 

Patriotism, 275 

Paulist Fathers, 224 

Phelps, Austin, 254 

Pilgrims and Puritans, union 
in New World, 175 

Potter, Bishop Henry C, In- 
tro., 262 

Prevost, Bishop, 211 

Pulpit, American history and, 
1 7 1-2 

Pulpit, Congregational, early 
ministers from Immanuel 
College, Cambridge, 176; a 
notable pulpit, 176; dis- 
tinctive contribution, 185 

Pulpit, Baptist, views, 186; 
rapid growth, 188; dis- 
tinctive contribution, 190 

Pulpit, Unitarian, forces, 
191-2; influence of, 202 

Pulpit, Methodist, lay preach- 
er of the colonies, 203; 
fervent evangelists, 206 \ 



INDEX 



285 



growth of education, 206; 

special contribution, 208 
Pulpit, Episcopal, early hin- 

derances, 209-10 ; special 

contribution, 217 
Pulpit, Presbyterian, two 

streams of influence, 218; 

the pioneers, 219; special 

influence, 223 
Pulpit, other churches, Quak- 
ers, Reformed, Disciples, 

Catholics, 224 
Pulpit, Present American. 

Compared with English 

and Scotch, 240 
Puritanism, 5 

Quakers, 223 
Quale, Bishop, 208 

Revolution, American, minis- 
ter in, 248 

Robinson, E. G., 189 

Robinson, John, farewell ser- 
mon, 13 

Root, Elihu, 274 

Rush, Benjamin, 252 

Ruskin, John, 269 

Scarlet Letter, The, 5 
Seabury, Bishop, 211 
Sectarianism, 240 
Seminary, Theological, 226 
Sermon, present and past, 

227 
Seymour, Sir Edward, 210 
Simeon, Charles, 213 
Simpson, Mathew, 206-7 
Slavery, American, 254 
Smuts, General, 278 



Social questions, the minis- 
ter's attitude to, 257-62 
Spaulding, Bishop, 224 
Speech in a Republic, 239 
Stalker, James, 158 
Stone, John Timothy, 236 
Storrs, Richard S., interpre- 
ter of life, 181 ; apologist, 
182 ; extempore preacher, 
182, 254 
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 5, 

16 
Sunday, William A., doctrine, 
165; reformer, 166; vir- 
tues and defects, 167-8 

Taylor, William M., 30, 184 
Taylor, William R., 236 
Tennant, 219 
Tennyson, Lord, 267 
Temple, William, 279 
Thackeray, the clergyman of 

Virginia, i 
Thompson, Joseph P., 254 
Thompson, Robert E., 219 
Tyng, Stephen H., 215 

Unitarianism, the growth of, 

Unity, Social, 2(£ 

Variety in American ser- 
mons, 235 
Vincent, John H., 208 
Vinton, Alexander H., 215 
Virginians, The, i 

Walpole, Sir Robert, 211 
Ward, Nathaniel, 244 
War, World and pulpit, 270-3 
Watson, John, humanness in 



286 



INDEX 



preaching, 228; return of 

the Gospel, 238 
Wayland, Francis, 189 
Webster, Daniel, 255, 265 
Wendell, Barrett, 11 
White, Bishop, 211 
Whittaker, Alexander, 2 
Whittier, John Greenleaf, 219 
Williams, Bishop C. D., 236 
Williams, Roger, notable 

name in Baptist history, 

186; character, 187; prophet 



of religious freedom, 187, 

247, 264 
Williams, William, 189 
Wilson, Woodrow, 266, 272 
Wise, Rabbi, 236 
Woelfkin, Cornelius, 236 
Wood, Charles, 236 
Woolman, John, 4, 223 
Wordsworth, William, 272 

Y. M. C. A., 274 



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